SOME IMPRESSIONS 
OF MY ELDERS 



BY 
ST. JOHN G. ERVINE 



^$m fnrk 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1922 
All Rights Reserved 



FBIKIED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 






Copyright, 1920 and 1921, 
Bt north AMERICAN REVIEW CORPORATION 

OOPTRiaHT, 1922, 

By ST. JOHN G. ERVINE 



Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1922 



©C!.A6rJ0 06 3 



VAIL.BALLOU COMPANy 

SINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK 



NOV -9 '22 



TO 
ELIZABETH CUTTING 

who would not give me any peace until I 
had overcome my idle habits and written 
all these impressions of my elders for the 
North American Review. 



CONTENTS 
THE AUTHOR TO HIS READERS .... 3 
A. E. (GEORGE WILLIAM RUSSELL) ... 25 

ARNOLD BENNETT 61 

G. K. CHESTERTON 90 

JOHN GALSWORTHY 113 

GEORGE MOORE 161 

BERNARD SHAW .189 

H. G. WELLS 240 

W. B. YEATS 264 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 



THE AUTHOR TO HIS 
READERS 



The matter which appears in the following pages 
was orginally contributed, in the shape of a series 
of articles under the general title of "Some Im- 
pressions of My Elders," to the North American 
Review at intervals during the years 1920 and 
1921. The order in which the articles appear 
in this hook is different from the order in which 
they appeared in the Review: this order is alpha- 
betical whereas that was capricious. Some ex- 
cisions and some additions have been made to them 
and I hope that I have evaded the danger which 
besets all those who reprint their journalism in 
book form, the danger of repetitions. Why I re- 
print them at all is a point on which I am not able 
to offer conclusive explanations. I have reached 
that period of my life when my wish is rather 
not to write a book than to write one, and I have 
lost all the cheery conceit which caused me in 

[3] 



THE AUTHOR TO HIS READERS 

my youth to feel that anything I wrote ought to 
be published in a handsome volume. Indeed, 
when I think of the great quantity of books there 
already are in this world, it seems to me a sign of 
hopeless irresponsibility to add to their number. 
There are so many books that ought to be read, but 
never can be read because there is not enough time 
for any of us to do so, that no author can plead 
justification for printing a book which does not 
come within the catalogue of those that ought to 
be read unless he needs the money which, pre- 
sumably, he will get for it. I cannot urge even 
that plea, for I have few needs and they are easily 
satisfied. I have never been afflicted with the 
mania for owning things, as Walt Whitman calls 
it, and therefore have no wish to accumulate either 
goods or money. Were it not for the insistence of 
some of my friends, I do not suppose I should 
issue this book to the public at all. We are too 
prone, we scribblers, to put our casual writings 
between the covers of a book, when regard for 
our craft would compel us to reserve that dignity 
for our greatest efforts; and I have feared for 
several years now to be one of these offenders, 

[4] 



THE AUTHOR TO HIS READERS 

And yet, one likes to have an array of books on a 
shelf and be able to say, "I wrote those." The pro- 
fession of writing gives degree and reputation to a 
man which is often greater than his due, and people 
of ability will listen respectfully to the opinions of 
a lesser person than themselves merely be- 
cause he (or even she) has printed a book. Many 
clever men and women actually paid good Ameri- 
can money to hear me talk on odds and ends of 
subjects, although they probably had views on 
them that were at least as sound as mine and no 
doubt a great deal sounder. I am afraid of this 
tribute to the author. It may make us, a much 
assorted crowd, esteem ourselves more highly than 
we are naturally prone to do. The mere fact that 
a man has contracted a profitable habit of putting 
words together does not entitle him to more of the 
world's respect that is due to one who has con- 
tracted the habit of putting bits of metal together 
and calling the result a motor-car. I do not know 
why a man who writes books should regard him- 
self as a better man than one who makes butter. 
Far less do I know why the man who makes butter 
should consent to believe that he is less worthy than 
the man who makes books. But undoubtedly some 

[5] 



THE AUTHOR TO HIS READERS 

such superstition fills the minds of most of us. 
When a man or woman of ordinary appearance 
and uninteresting speech comes into our presence, 
we say "How do you do!" and turn away; but when 
we are informed that this same person has written 
a novel, immediately we become interested and 
turn again to him or her in the expectation that 
something profoundly illuminating will be said to 
us. Experience does not cure us of that delusive 
hope. We do not prick up our ears when a man 
who owns the largest motor-car factory in the world 
comes into our presence, and we yawn in the face of 
a railway director Yet either of these may be 
far more entertaining company than any author. 
It is true that the author is presumably more im- 
aginative than the owner of the factory or the pres- 
ident of the railroad, and perhaps the instinctive 
tribute paid by mankind to the author, even when 
mankind omits to buy his books, is a recognition 
of the value of imagination to human life. As 
such I gladly accept it. Nevertheless, I could 
wish for more discrimination in these tributes. On 
the whole, I would prefer to see our authors 
neglected than over-estimated. No one on earth 
and probably no one in heaven can prevent an 

[6] 



THE AUTHOR TO HIS READERS 

author from making books while he has breath in 
his body and energy in his brain and fingers. 
Therefore, neglect will not greatly harm him. 
But too much praise, too much consideration of 
his views, above all, too much profit from his 
work, will make a sad mess of an excellent writer. 
I tell myself sometimes that no author should be 
praised until he is dead, though he might 
occasionally be dispraised during his lifetime. 
We should thus save our authors, though there is 
no certainty in this, from excess of vanity. Let 
Shakespeare's reputation grow to legendary pro- 
portions when he is safely within his grave, but 
do not, if you desire the best that is in him, let 
him be often or much praised while he is alive. 
We have come to a period of time when authors 
feel that they must write so many books each 
year. But I would have an author publish a book 
only when the compulsion to publish it becomes 
greater than he can resist. Books would not neces- 
sarily be better, but they would certainly be fewer, 
and they might be better. 



[7] 



THE AUTHOR TO HIS READERS 
II 

I have written thus far, partly to resolve my own 
doubts (which, however, are not resolved) but 
chiefly to excuse myself to those who may buy this 
book. I beg of them to believe that I have not 
reprinted these fugitive pieces without deliber- 
ation on their value. My friends tell me that 
any impressions of men of quality and genius 
have value, and undoubtedly Boswell's biography 
of Dr. Johnson confirms many mediocrities in their 
intention to accept a man's hospitality for the 
purpose of earning money by describing his per- 
sonal habits in a public journal. We would be 
very grateful for an account of Shakespeare no 
better than any one of the chapters in this book 
If an Elizabethan had had a mind like Boswell's 
and had noted down all that he ever heard 
Shakespeare say, had pressed him with questions 
on his work, had noted his personal appearance, 
his habits of dress, his ways of eating, his 
eff'ect on women, his likes and dislikes, the thou- 
sand and one small things which, when summed 
up, make a man out of a myth, how happy we 
should all be, how many thousand commentators 

[8] 



THE AUTHOR TO HIS READERS 

and emendators and wrathful Baconians and cy- 
pher maniacs would be put out of employment! 
One could cry with vexation at the thought that 
there was no one with sufficient intelligence to keep 
a diary during those last few mysterious years 
in Stratford-on-Avon when Shakespeare, though 
still a young man as ages go, ceased to work at his 
trade and went in silence to his grave. Such are 
the considerations which have affected me in my 
decision to reprint these chapters, though they 
may add very little to any one's knowledge of the 
men who are described in them. It is, perhaps, 
an additional factor in the decision that they 
record impressions made on the mind of a young 
man by his elders and betters and expressed at 
a time when he was ceasing to be young. The 
generation to which I belong was much impressed 
by the men whose work and beliefs are sketched 
in this book. All young men, whatever their class 
or culture, have heroes. The world, indeed, will 
end when young men cease to have heroes. 
Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells, Mr. Chesterton and Mr. 
Belloc, Mr. Yeats and Mr. Moore, Mr. Bennett and 
Mr. Galsworthy and, rather more remotely, "A. 
E." were heroes worthy of emulation by me and 

[9] 



THE AUTHOR TO HIS READERS 

the likes of me. George Meredith and Mr. Hardy 
were too far up the slopes of Olympus for us to 
hope ever to touch the hem of their garments, but 
we were alive in the same world with them and 
sometimes spoke with people who knew them. 
Once, even, on a hot Sunday morning I walked 
for miles in Surrey, stiff with determination to 
see Meredith and to speak with him, even if I 
should have to skulk about his house the entire 
day and run the risk of being arrested for suspi- 
cious loitering; but my heart failed me when, tired 
and thirsty, I came* into his neighbourhood. Who 
was I, I dem'anded of myself, that I should thrust 
my unimportant person on the notice of a genius? 
And when I had made that demand of myself, I 
realised that I could do no other than go away and 
leave the- old man in peace. And so I went, though 
now I regret that I did, for a little while after I 
made my expedition to Box Hill, Meredith died 
and I had lost for ever my hope of seeing him. 
Time has been kinder to me over Mr. Hardy whose 
friendship I have the happiness to enjoy. 

I have described these men as our heroes, but of 
course the degree of respect we gave to them varied. 
The feeling we had for Mr. Galsworthy, for ex- 

[10] 



THE AUTHOR TO HIS READERS 

ample, was diminislied by the fact that we were 
afraid he would turn aside and shed a few unac- 
countable tears. His work, particularly "The Man 
of Property," "The Country House" and "The Sil- 
ver Box," had the great appeal which all passion- 
ately sincere work has, but it left some of us in a 
state of chilled speculation. We were afraid of 
the effect Mr. Galsworthy had on our emotions and 
we resisted him more, perhaps, than we ought to 
have done because we suspected him of sentimen- 
tality and were afraid he 'might let our minds 
down by pressing too hardly on our hearts. His 
work excited a remote pity in us, but it did not 
rouse us to wrath or warm our affections. His 
characters were the creatures of an aloof, impas- 
sive and immovable Destiny; and it is difficult to 
feel much interest in automatons. If a man is 
wronged by another man, I may be stirred to his 
defence, but if he is thwarted or crushed by some 
passionless Force which cannot be controlled or 
persuaded or defeated, I am unlikely to do more 
than murmur "Poor fellow!" and pass on my way. 
Spineless men, impotently submitting to Circum- 
stances, do not stir the blood, and Mr. Galsworthy's 
characters, though they might excite our pity, killed 

[11] 



THE AUTHOR TO HIS READERS 

our hope. Mr. Galsworthy seemed to us to say, 
"Vain youths, it is idle to make any effort! Things 
happen and they cannot be helped. You are 
doomed from the moment of your birth to die 
frustrated! . . ." He is easily made indignant by 
suffering, but we could not imagine him sounding 
a call to fight. We could think of him only in the 
act of surrender. We asked for a challenge; he 
counselled submission. He was a Tolstoyan, not 
of his Free Will, for he had no Free Will, but 
because he could not help himself. He turned the 
other cheek because he would not clench his fist. 
Mr. Hardy did not fill our mouths with dust as 
Mr. Galsworthy did, for his people, though they, 
too, were creatures of Destiny, were gallant crea- 
tures and went to their end with a noble gesture. 
He left us with the sensation that although we 
were obliged to submit to a doom determined for 
us by a Power that understood neither Itself nor 
us, yet we could put ribbons in our hats. We 
could die like men and not like rats. When Mr. 
Hardy celebrated his eighty-first birthday, his 
younger comrades in the craft of letters presented 
an address to him from which I quote the follow- 
ing passages: 

[12] 



THE AUTHOR TO HIS READERS 

*'In your novels and poems you have given us a 
tragic vision of life which is informed by your knowl- 
edge of character and relieved by the charity of your 
humour and sweetened by your sympathy with human 
suffering and endurance. We have learned from you 
that the proud heart can subdue the hardest fate, even 
in submitting to it. When Mr. Justice Shallow sought 
to instruct Sir John Falstaff in the choice of soldiers, 
the knight said: *Care I for the limbs, the thewes, the 
stature, bulk and big assemblance of a man? Give me 
the spirit. Master Shallow.' So would you have 
answered him, for in all that you have written you have 
shown the spirit of man, nourished by tradition and sus- 
tained by pride, persisting through defeat. You have 
inspired us both by your work and by the manner in 
which it was done. The craftsman in you calls for our 
admiration as surely as the artist, and few writers have 
observed so closely as you have the Host's instruction 
in the Canterbury Tales: 

Your termes, your colours and your figures, 

Keep them in store, till so be ye indite 

High style, as when that men to kinges write. 

From your first book to your last, you have written 
in the 'high style, as when that men to kinges write,' 
and you have crowned a ^eat prose with a noble 
poetry." 

Those extracts express, I think, some of the 
quiet quality of courage discoverable in the de- 

[13] 



THE AUTHOR TO HIS READERS 

terminism of Mr. Hardy, but absent from the de- 
terminism of Mr. Galsworthy. 



Ill 



Our attitude towards Mr. Shaw, Mr. Wells, Mr. 
Chesterton and Mr. Belloc was very different from 
our attitude towards Mr. Galsworthy. These chal- 
lenging, fighting, protesting men were concerned 
less with pity for the victims of life than with 
anger against or opposition to the oppressors of 
life. They did not wring their hands; they put 
up their fists. The Early Twentieth Century Youth 
listened respectfully to Mr. Galsworthy, but he 
went out to fight with Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells 
and Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc. These four 
men did not move him in equal measure. Mr. 
Wells stimulated him with the quick succession of 
his ideas, but disconcerted him also with the rapid- 
ity with which he shed one idea for another. 
While we were willing to challenge everything and 
make it justify its existence, we were eager also to 
find firm ground for our feet. We felt that Mr. 
Wells ought to make up his mind a little more care^ 
fully before he took the public into his confidence. 

[14] 



THE AUTHOR TO HIS READERS 

Mr. Shaw's awful consistency, even when he took 
to religion, drew us to him more than Mr. Wells's 
willingness to modify or enlarge his views. Mr. 
Belloc and Mr. Qiesterton stimulated us in a dif- 
ferent way from that in which Mr. Shaw and Mr. 
Wells stimulated us. Mr. Wells sent us out into 
llie world in search of new and more adequate for- 
mulae; Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton checked us 
in headlong flights with words of warning and re- 
monstrance. They reminded us that man is of the 
earth, earthy; that man does not live by Good Will 
alone; that society is composed of a great variety 
of beings, generous and mean, exalted and debased, 
hearty and miserable, noble and ignoble, self- 
sacrificing and self-seeking, kind and cruel; and 
they reminded us also that unless we took care to 
remember fhis vital fact of the variety of man, 
we should lose our way in the deserts ahead of us. 
They told us that Mr. Wells's "Good Will" was 
merely Godwin's "Universal Benevolence" all over 
again, and that Godwin's doctrine had made the 
way easy for the Utilitarians and the growth 
of a devitalizing political theory which ex- 
pressed itself in the brutal industrial system of the 
first half of the nineteenth century. Mr. Wells 

[15] 



THE AUTHOR TO HIS READERS 

sought to convict man of a sense of stupidity and 
disorganization, but they sought to convict him of a 
sense of sin. Mr. Wells reminded man of his 
power to aspire; they reminded him of his lapse 
from grace. Mr. Wells said, "You can climb!" 
They said, "You have fallen!" He said, "Think!" 
They said, "Repent!" The world, in Mr. Wells's 
opinion, needed Love and Fine Thinking. In the 
opinion of Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton it needed 
the love of God and faith in the Catholic Church. 
There probably was less difference in essentials 
between Mr. Wells and the Chesterbelloc, as Mr. 
Shaw nicknamed them, than appeared on the sur- 
face of things. The Catholic Church in its organ- 
ized state may move Mr. Wells to admiration, 
though, in its religious aspect, it probably moves 
him only to derision. It is a shabby sort of faith, 
with a tendency to tawdriness which makes it ulti- 
mately unsuitable to the spiritual needs of a gentle- 
man, although adequate to the needs of servant- 
girls and actors. No one who has visited a Cath- 
olic church or witnessed the ceremonials in Rome 
can help, if he or she be possessed of any culture 
at all, feeling that the whole business is second- 
rate: the effort of an overblown actor-manager to 

[16] 



THE AUTHOR TO HIS READERS 

interpret Shakespeare in pretentious terms. The 
fundamental sanity of Mr. Chesterton has, no 
doubt, saved him from the folly of secession to 
Rome,* but his partiality for it and Mr. Belloc's 
rigid attainment to it, made the young men of my 
time suspicious of the Ghesterbelloc. Mr. Belloc 
said, on a public occasion, that he would support 
the Church in an act of repression if the Church 
came into serious conflict with an antagonist; and 
he proved that he meant what he said by applaud- 
ing the execution of Ferrer, the anti-clerical, in 
Spain. It was natural, perhaps, that my Orange 
blood should boil when I heard Mr. Belloc palli- 
ating the offences of his obsolete church, but my 
more tolerant friends were as dashed by his be- 
haviour as I was, and what respect we had for 
him was considerably diminished by the knowledge 
that he would always come to heel when some priest 
snapped fingers at him. Neither he nor Mr. Ches- 
terton, although their criticism interested and on 
occasions checked us, ever established dominion 
over us because of their preoccupation with 
Catholicism. They might spell the word with a cap- 
ital C, but we knew very well that Mr. Belloc in 
his heart spelt it with a small one, and we were 

[17] 



THE AUTHOR TO HIS READERS 

not going to deliver ourselves into the hands of 
men who were priest-ridden, however "jolly" 
they might be or however well they might write. 

We were not interested in their beer-swilling hab- 
its which we regarded as queer nastinesses in other- 
wise reputable persons. Their efforts to make a 
tenet of religion out of beer-swilling seemed to us 
to be as ridiculous as would be an effort by a 
Chinaman to make a tenet of religion out of opium- 
smoking. 

Mr. Shaw was incontestably the supreme figure 
among these men of mind who stimulated and in- 
fluenced the young men and women of the Early 
Twentieth Century. I doubt whether any one has 
ever captured or held the fancy of young men as 
Mr. Shaw captured and held our fancy. Dr. 
Johnson had an influence as powerful in his time 
as Mr. Shaw had in ours; but Dr. Johnson's influ- 
ence was mainly exercised over men of older years 
than we were, of more established habits than we 
had; and I doubt very much whether he affected 
their thoughts and outlook on life so profoundly 
as Mr. Shaw affected us. He could not persuade 
the faithful Boswell to accept his view of the Ameri- 
can colonists, and his pamphlet, "Taxation No 

[18] 



THE AUTHOR TO HIS READERS 

Tyranny" displeased his friends as much as it ap- 
peared to gratify George III and his supporters. 
Dr. Johnson was a critic and a scholar with very 
little creative ability; he was too conservative a 
man to be a man of genius; and he looked back 
too often for the liking of young men who are al- 
ways looking forward. His love of tradition and 
settled order, while it was pleasing to men of an 
age when comfort and security and familiar things 
began to attract the mind more than effort and 
adventure and change, made him unattractive to the 
stirring minds of young men. Shelley derived 
from Godwin, not from Johnson. 

There is a passage in Boswell's "Life of Dr. 
Johnson" in which Dr. Johnson's peculiar views on 
the respect due to men of rank are set out very 
clearly. 

"... a discussion took place, whether . . . Lord Cardross 
did right to refuse to go Secretary of the Embassy to 
Spain, when Sir James Gray, a man of inferior rank, 
went Ambassador. Dr. Johnson said, that perhaps in 
point of interest he did wrong; but in point of dignity 
he did well. . . . Sir, had he gone Secretary while his 
inferior was Ambassador, he would have been a traitor 
to his rank and family." 

[19] 



THE AUTHOR TO HIS READERS 

The question, to Dr. Johnson's mind, was not one 
of merit: Lord Cardross was entitled to "go Am- 
bassador," not because he was a more skilful dip- 
lomatist than Sir James Gray, but because he was 
a lord while Sir James was only a knight! This 
extraordinary doctrine, which may be held account- 
able for much in British history, might appeal to 
elderly men who love rules and regulations and 
like to have everything neatly set out in books, 
but it certainly does not appeal to young men who 
believe in conflicts won by superior qualities; for 
young men, as Dr. Johnson himself said on one oc- 
casion, "have more virtue than old men; they have 
more generous sentiments in every respect." 

Mr. Shaw is incapable of uttering such a re- 
mark as Dr. Johnson uttered in support of Lord 
Cardross's inept behaviour. He has, indeed, said 
and written foolish things and he is capable of 
making what are called "debating" points and 
cheap scores and of saying things for the sake of 
saying them or of annoying the complacent and 
the smug; but he is incapable of saying anything 
which supports a belief that one man shall have 
precedence over another, not because of his merit, 
but because of his birth. Dr. Johnson's statement 

[20] 



THE AUTHOR TO HIS READERS 

was not a casual, fantastic, perverse statement; it 
was a natural result of his general theory of so- 
ciety. It is recorded of him that he declined to 
leave a room until a Bishop had done so on the 
ground that the Bishop's office gave him a title to 
precedence over a man of greater mentality! It 
was not humility that caused Dr. Johnson to be- 
have thus, for he was an arrogant man, nor was 
it indifference to such matters, for he was a stickler 
for respect to himself even when he did not de- 
serve respect: it was his belief in the providential 
arrangement of society in settled grades that caused 
him to behave in this way. The man was entitled 
to quit the room first, not because he was a good 
man or a great man, but because he was a bishop! 
There is probably some convenience in this 
belief, a simple method of preventing incivility, 
but it is a small convenience which does not greatly 
matter to youth. 

I can imagine Mr. Shaw refusing to go out of 
the room before the Bishop has done so, in sheer 
humility or indifference, but I cannot imagine him 
refusing to do so because of his regard for the 
man's office as distinct from the man himself. 
And it is, I suppose, his irreverence for office, more 

[21] 



THE AUTHOR TO HIS READERS 

than anything else, which draws young men to 
him. He is no respecter of persons or authorities: 
he criticizes them all, high or low. His courage, 
his vitality, his arrogance, his humility, his champ- 
ionship of persecuted persons, his impulse to help 
an unpopular cause not, as stupid people imagine, 
because it is unpopular, but because it seems to 
him to be a just cause, and his absolute indiffer- 
ence to vested interests and the power of the ma- 
jority — these qualities of his drav/ young men to 
him as a magnet draws a needle. It is significant, 
I think, that Dr. Johnson had a very strong dis- 
like of Dean Swift to whom, in many respects, 
Bernard Shaw bears a close mental resemblance. 
It is very certain that had Bernard Shaw lived in 
the eighteenth century, to which, in spirit, he really 
belongs, he would have supported the Americans 
as fiercely as Johnson denounced them; and I do 
not doubt that his would have been the most scath- 
ing and powerful of the pamphlets written in reply 
to "Taxation No Tyranny." 



[22] 



THE AUTHOR TO HIS READERS 

IV 

These, then, were the men who guided in 
greater or less degree the opinions of the young 
men and women of the Early Twentieth Century 
in the islands of Great Britain and Ireland. "A. 
E." greatly influenced young Irishmen who re- 
mained curiously unimpressed either by Mr. 
Moore or Mr. Yeats. Rumours of his doctrine 
came to the ears of young Englishman, but they 
had no personal contact with him as they had with 
Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells and Mr. Belloc and 
Mr. Chesterton. It is not possible to calculate 
the extent to which these men moulded the minds 
of my generation, but indisputably it was large. 
No one who grew from youth to manhood between 
1900 and 1914 could escape from their influence, 
even if he were unconscious of it. The greater 
part of that generation died in the War. The 
young men who drew their ideas chiefly from Mr. 
Wells and Mr. Shaw, directly or indirectly, did 
not live to make their world, and so we can never 
tell what good or ill would have resulted to man- 
kind had they succeeded to authority. Their 
bones are buried in France and Italy, in Pales- 

[23] 



THE AUTHOR TO HIS READERS 

line and Turkey, in Russia and East Africa, on 
the shores of Gallipoli and in the marshes of Sa- 
lonica, in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean 
and the North Sea; and there is nothing to remem- 
ber them by but broken lands in France and the 
broken vows of politicians the world over. These 
young men went out to die in a mood of selfless- 
ness that has never, perhaps, been equalled or ex- 
celled in the history of mankind; and when their 
backs were turned, they were betrayed. We can- 
not look on them again, but we may find com- 
fort in our loss by remembering and considering 
the men who formed the faith they held. 



[24] 



"A. E." 

(GEORGE WILLIAM RUSSELL) 
I 

In all the books on Ireland, considered nationally, 
socially and economically, that have been written 
in the past twenty years, two men inevitably are 
mentioned: Sir Horace Plunkett and "A. E. ," 
whose lawful name is George William Russell. 
Men of affairs in most parts of the world have 
heard of them, and I imagine that very few of the 
people who go to Ireland with any serious purpose 
fail to visit them. I saw Sir Horace Plunkett re- 
ceive an ovation from a large audience in New 
York which could only have been given to him by 
people who had some knowledge and appreciation 
of his work for his country; and I was impressed 
by the fact that many Americans asked me to tell 
them something of "A. E." And yet, though the 
wide world is not ignorant of their worth, it is 
very likely that they are less generally known in 

[25] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

Ireland than some paltry politician with a gift for 
street-corner rhetoric. Once, in Dublin, I praised 
Sir Horace Plunkett to a man from the county of 
Cavan, who interrupted me to say that no one in 
his village had ever heard of Sir Horace. He 
seemed to imagine that the ignorance of his 
neighbours proved a demerit in the founder of 
the co-operative movement in Ireland. Your 
villagers, said I, may never have heard of Sir 
Horace Plunkett and are probably very familiar 
with the names of Mr. Charles Chaplin and 
Miss Mary Pickford, but does that prove that Mr. 
Chaplin is a greater man than Sir Horace? I 
am not indifferent to the merits of Mr. Chaplin — 
I would go a long way to see him in the movies 
— but I hope I shall never succumb to this modern 
shoddy democracy which will not believe that a 
man possesses quality unless his name is printed 
frequently in the newspapers and is familiarly 
known to the rabble. It may be that Paudeen, un- 
fit to do more than "fumble in a greasy till," as Mr. 
Yeats wrote in his bitter poem, "September, 
1913," knows little or nothing of Sir Horace 
Plunkett whose life labours have brought so much 
of comfort and prosperity to him — but who cares 

[26] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

what Paudeen knows? Let him grub in the soil, 
as God made him to grub, while men of mind and 
quality look after his affairs. It is sufficient for 
the knowledgeable minority that they know of 
Sir Horace and realize the value of the great 
work he has done for his country. A false opti- 
mism bids us to believe that "we needs must love 
the highest when we see it," but a sense of reality 
convinces us that the highest has to fight harder 
for recognition than the lowest, and that the way 
to the throne of heaven passes through Golgotha, 
the place of a skull. 



II 

If it be true that Sir Horace Plunkett is less 
known to his countrymen than some fellow with 
flashy wits, it is more certain to be true that his 
great colleague in co-operation, "A. E. ," is still 
less known to them. It would be difficult for 
any intelligent person to come into the presence 
of "A. E." and remain unaware that he is a man 
of merit. He fills a room immediately and un- 
mistakably with the power of his personality. A 
tall, bearded, untidy man, with full lips and bulk- 

[27] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

ily-built body, he draws attention by his deep, 
grey eyes. When he speaks, other people listen. 
If you were to meet him in the street, unaware of 
his identity, and he were to ask you for a match 
with which to light his pipe, you would do more 
than civilly comply with his request. You would 
certainly say to yourself, "That's a remarkable 
man!" It is said, with what verity I cannot say, 
that Mr. Bernard Shaw and "A. E." met for the 
first time in a picture-gallery in Dublin, each igno- 
rant of the other's identity, and that they began 
to talk of Art. They impressed each other so 
greatly that they continued in argument for a long 
time, and only, when they parted, did they become 
knov/n to each other. The mountains nod to each 
other over the heads of the little hills; and men of 
merit, even when they are not easily recognized by 
the multitude, are known to each other. One man 
of merit may, indeed, belittle another man of merit, 
as Dr. Johnson belittled Fielding, as George 
Meredith belittled Dickens, as Henry James be- 
littled Ibsen and Thomas Hardy; but at least 
they are aware of each other. 



[28] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

III 

Very often have writers told the story of 
how Sir Horace Plunkett, a tongue-tied, hesitant 
man with very delicate health, returned to Ireland 
after a long stay in America, to begin the Go-oper- 
ative Movement, and found, in a Dublin shop, keep- 
ing accounts for a tea-merchant, a poet and a 
painter, a mystic who was also an economist with 
the capacity, as it afterwards proved, to become 
the ablest journalist in Ireland. This man of mul- 
tiple energies was George William Russell, who 
was born in Lurgan, in the Gounty of Armagh, on 
April 10, 1867. He is two years younger than 
Mr. Yeats, eleven years younger than Mr. Shaw, 
and fifteen years younger than Mr. George Moore. 
The order of these births is significant. Observe 
how an aloof artist has been succeeded by a furious 
economist! Mr. Moore, who began life as a 
realist after the manner, but not after the style, of 
Zola, and then turned his back on Zola and sought 
the company of Turgeniev so that he might pursue 
apt and beautiful words and delicate and elusive 
thoughts, was followed by Mr. Shaw, who began 
life by filling his mind with the ideas of Henry 

[29] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

George and Karl Marx, and then turned his back 
on both of them in order that he might consort 
with Mr. Sidney Webb. Mr. Yeats, with his vague 
poetry and vague mysticism — none the less vague 
because of the curious care for exactness which 
causes him to count the nine and fifty swans at 
Coole and the nine bean rows on Innisfree — fol- 
lowed Mr. Shaw, and in his turn was followed by 
"A. E." so closely connected with economics that 
a wag, when asked what was the meaning of "A. 
E's." pen-name, replied "agricultural economist." * 
One cannot, however, leave the matter as simply 
as that. Mr. Shaw likes to think of himself as an 
economist, but he is more than an economist; he 
is John the Baptist pretending to be Karl Marx. 
"A. E." likes to think of himself as an expert on 
the price of butter and milk and cows and sheep, 
but he is more than an expert on these things: he 
is Blake pretending to be Sir Horace Plunkett. Or 

* Mr. Darrell Figgis, in his book on "A. E.", explains the 
pen-name thus: "Wanting at one time a new pen-name, he sub- 
scribed himself as Aeon. His penmanship not at all times being 
of the legiblest, the printer deciphered the first diphthong and 
set a query for the rest; whereupon the writer, in his proof-sheets, 
stroked out the query and stood by the diphthong." Since then, 
however, Mr. Russell has abandoned the diphthong and prints 
his pen name as two separate letters. 

[30] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

Walt Whitman pretending to be President Wilson. 
It has always seemed to me that Sir Horace Plun- 
kett and "A. E.," colleagues in a great enterprise, 
are the embodiment of the peculiarly interwoven 
strands of Irish character, of that queer mingling 
of the material and the spiritual in the Irish people 
which at once allures and astounds the Englishman, 
accustomed to keeping his materialism and his 
spirituality in separate compartments. Sir Hor- 
ace has a neat and unexpected wit, but he does 
not appear to me to have much feeling for poetry 
or for any other literature or art. He has respect 
for these things and will talk on them sometimes 
with singular incisiveness, but his interest in them 
is an outside interest. If he had to choose between 
a co-operative creamery and the Heroic Legends 
of Ireland, I do not doubt for a moment that he 
would choose the co-operative creamery. "A. E.," 
on the contrary, would choose the Heroic Legends 
and would give the good reason for so doing that 
without the Heroic Legends, the co-operative cream- 
ery is useless. When "A. E." pleads for the co- 
operative societies, he does so because he believes 
that these are part of the means whereby the Irish 
people will be restored to their ancient stature. 

[31] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

Organize your industry, he said to the farmers, 
so that you may become what your fathers were, 
fit company for the Shining Ones, for Lugh and 
Balor and Manannan, the great and brave and 
beautiful Pagan gods. Each by himself, Sir Hor- 
ace or "A. E.," might have failed to make much 
out of the co-operative movement in Ireland, but 
both together, each possessed of a different, yet 
complementary, crusading spirit, could not fail 
to make a happy issue of it. When Garibaldi 
appealed for recruits for his Thousand, he offered 
them wounds and death. When Sir Horace Plun- 
kett appealed for helpers in the Irish Agricultural 
Organization Society, he offered them hard and 
discouraging labour and poor wages. Mankind, 
which responds to a noble appeal as readily as it 
responds to a base appeal, offered its best to both 
of them. Garibaldi got his Thousand, and Sir 
Horace Plunkett got his colleagues. 

They were diverse in character, and included 
Nationalists and Unionists, Catholics and Protes- 
tants, peers and peasants. For the first time in 
Irish history. Irishmen of all classes were united 
on a matter which had no relationship with 
passions! There were no angry emotions astir 

[32] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

when the I. A. 0. S. brought the diverse elements of 
the Irish entity into accord as there had been when 
the union of the North and the South was made 
many years earlier; and consequently the move- 
ment could not be split, as that Union was, by the 
collision of one angry emotion with another. In 
face of every conceivable discouragement and 
even of active enmity and in spite of the grave 
unhealth of Sir Horace himself, the movement 
grew in strength until now it is indestructible.* 
Chief among the colleagues whom Sir Horace 
gathered about him was "A. E." Mr. Russell 
could, without doubt, earn a large income as a 
journalist if he were to offer his pen to a rich 
newspaper proprietor — his weekly review, the 
Irish Homestead, is the most ably-edited and 
skillfully-written organ in Ireland — and he could 
probably earn as much as, if not more than, 
he receives from his Co-operative work if he were 

* I leave that passage unmodified, despite the fact that the 
Black-and-Tans in the course of their fight with the Sinn Feiners 
(equally disgraceful to both of them) burnt down many of the 
creameries. They will be built again. Mr. Lloyd George jeered 
at Sir Horace Plunkett soon after the Black-and-Tans had per- 
formed most of their infamous work, but any decent person 
would infinitely prefer to be Sir Horace with his burnt creameries 
than Mr. Lloyd George with his burnt principles. 

[33] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

to devote himself exclusively to his mystical and 
poetical writings; but just as Mazzini felt him- 
self compelled to sacrifice his heart's desire, the 
life of a man of letters, in order to devote him- 
self to a political career which was distasteful to 
him, so "A. E." felt compelled to hitch his star to 
Sir Horace Plunkett's wagon, and for many years 
now he has preached, week after week, the gospel 
of co-operation to Irish farmers when he would, 
perhaps, have preferred exclusively to tell stories 
of the ancient gods and heroes. 



IV 



But the Co-operative Movement did not ab- 
sorb the whole of his energies. He is as many- 
sided as William Morris was, almost as many- 
sided as Leonardo da Vinci. His work on the 
Irish Homestead would seem to be sufficient to 
employ all the vitality of a healthy, active man, 
but "A. E." cannot be contained within the pages 
of a weekly review, and so, while writing four or 
five pages every week of the finest journalism to be 
found in Great Britain or Ireland, he has also pro- 
duced seven remarkable books and painted many 

[34] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

pictures, engaged in political and economic con- 
troversy, and sat as a member of the Irish Conven- 
tion which endeavoured, in 1917, to discover a 
solution of the Irish Problem. In a strange and, 
to me, incomprehensible book, called "The Candle 
of Vision," he has wrought his mysticism to such 
a pitch of practicality that he is able to offer his 
readers an alphabet with which to interpret the 
language of the Gods! It manifests itself in some 
of his pictures, where strange, luminous and 
irightly-coloured creatures are seen shining in 
some ordinary landscape, creatures that seemed 
to me, when I first saw them, akin to Red Indians. 
In everything that he writes and does, there is a 
consciousness of some spiritual presence, not the 
spiritual presence of the Christian theology, but 
of the Pagan Legends. One night, in his house 
in Dublin, I drew^ the attention of a lady to one of 
his pictures, a dark landscape, in the centre of 
which a very brilliant and beautiful creature was 
dancing. "A. E." turned to us and said, "That's 
the one I saw!" and I remembered the story I 
had been told earlier in the evening, that he saw 
fairies, that he actually took penny tram-rides 
from Dublin to go up into the mountains to see the 

[35] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

fairies! I do not remember what the lady said, 
but I remember that she looked exceedingly aston- 
ished, and, indeed, I myself felt some astonish- 
ment. If Mr. Yeats had said that he had seen 
a fairy, I should have smiled indulgently and 
should neither have believed that he had seen one 
nor that he himself believed that he had seen one. 
But while I do not believe that "A. E." saw a 
fairy, otherwise than in his imagination, I am cer- 
tain that he believes he saw one, not as a creature 
of the mind, but as one having flesh and blood. 
He claims no peculiar merit for himself in seeing 
visions. "There is no personal virtue in me," he 
writes in "The Candle of Vision," "other than this 
that I followed a path all may travel but on which 
few do journey." He tells his readers how they, 
too, if they have the wish, may see the things which 
he has seen, and he gives descriptions of some of 
his visions. People as incredulous as I am can 
very easily dispose of "A. E.'s" visions as the fan- 
tasies of a man suffering perhaps from inadequate 
nourishment — for "A. E." was careless about his 
meals in those days — just as the visions of St. 
Theresa and St. Catherine of Sienna may be ex- 
plained by the feverishness of mind that comes 

[36] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

to people who are starving themselves or are suf- 
fering from neurosis. Here is an account of one 
of his visions. You are to understand that it is 
not a dream such as you and I have when we are 
asleep, but something seen by a man who is awake 
at broad of day, something actual, something that 
you who read this might also see if you were to 
follow the path on which he has travelled : 

So did I feel one warm summer day lying idly on the 
hillside, not then thinking of anything but the sunlight, 
and how sweet it was to drowse there, when, suddenly, I 
felt a fiery heart throb, and knew it was personal and 
intimate, and started with every sense dilated and intent, 
and turned inwards, and I heard first a music as of bells 
going away, away into that wonderous underland 
whither, as legend relates, the Danaan gods withdraw; 
and then the heart of the hills was opened to me, and I 
knew there was no hill for those who were there, and 
they were unconscious of the ponderous mountain piled 
above the palaces of light, and the winds were sparkling 
and diamond clear, yet full of color as an opal, as they 
glittered through the valley, and I knew the Golden Age 
was all about me, and it was we who had been blind to 
it but that it had never passed away from the world. 

The Golden Age is here, at this moment, and 
all the noble creatures who filled it with chivalry 

[37] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

and beauty are crowding about us. We have only 
to open our eyes and we shall see! . . . 

Once, suddenly, I found myself on some remote plain 
or steppe, and heard unearthly chimes pealing passion- 
ately from I know not what far steeples. The earth- 
breath streamed from the furrows to the glowing heavens. 
Overhead the birds flew round and round crying their 
incomprehensible cries, as if they were maddened, and 
knew not where to nestle, and had dreams of some more 
enraptured rest in a diviner home. 1 could see a plough- 
man lift himself from his obscure toil and stand with lit 
eyes as if he too had been fire-smitten and was caught 
into heaven as I was, and knew for that moment he was 
a god. 

It is very vague, the disbeliever feels, and there 
is nothing in it to make one accept it as a vision of 
a thing actually seen, rather than fancied ; but there 
can be no doubt of the intensity with which "A. E." 
believes in the actuality of it. These visions form 
the foundation of his political and economic faith. 
He advocates co-operative enterprise because he be- 
lieves in his visions as actual happenings. In 
a poem, called "Earth Breath," he says: 

From the cool and dark-lipped furrows breathes a 
dim delight 

[38] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

Through the woodland's purple plumage to the 

diamond night. 
Aureoles of joy encircle every blade of grass 
Where the dew-fed creatures silent and enraptured 

pass. 
And the restless ploughman pauses, turns, and, 

wondering, 
Deep beneath his rustic habit finds himself a king. 

This verse is obviously a poetical account of the 
experience he underwent "on some remote plain 
or steppe," and the final couplet of it gives the 
explanation of his belief in democracy. If he had 
no faith in the god in man, if he were not certain 
that "the restless ploughma»n . . . deep beneath 
his rustic habit finds himself a king," he would 
probably offer his allegiance to autocracy and be- 
lieve in government by a caste; but since he has 
seen visions and is convinced that there is a god 
in man, he cannot be other than a democrat. All 
his political strivings have been directed towards 
making this "a society where people will be at 
harmony in their economic life," as he writes in 
"The National Being," and "will readily listen to 
different opinions from their own, will not turn 
sour faces on those who do not think as they do, 
but will, by reason and sympathy, comprehend 

[39] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

each other, and come at last, through sympathy 
and affection, to a balancing of their diversities, 
as in that multitudinous diversity which is the 
universe, powers and dominions and elements are 
balanced, and are guided harmoniously by the 
Shepherd of the Ages." Whether such a world, 
balanced in that way, can be rightly described as 
a democracy is not a matter on which I offer any 
opinion here, though it seems to me to be a very 
long way from what the common man considers 
a democracy to be. 



It is when we come to connect his visions and 
the beliefs he derives from them with the actual 
circumstances in which we find ourselves that we 
begin to be most dubious. "National ideals," he 
says in "The National Being," "are the possession 
of a few people only." That is an argument for 
aristocracy. 

Yet we must spread them in wide commonahy over 
Ireland if we are to create a civilisation worthy of our 
hopes and our ages of struggle and sacrifice to attain 
the power to build. We must spread them in wide com- 
monalty because it is certain that democracy will prevail 
in Ireland. The aristocratic classes with traditions of 

[40] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

government, the manufacturing classes with economic 
experience, will alike be secondary in Ireland to the 
small farmers and the wage-earners in the towns. We 
must rely on the ideas common among our people, and 
on their power to discern among their countrymen the 
aristocracy of character and intellect. 

With the deletion of the word "Ireland" and 
the substitution of the word "America," that quota- 
tion might stand just as effective for the United 
States as for Ireland. Why is it certain that 
democracy will prevail in Ireland? Because the 
small farmers and the wage-earners in the towns 
will take precedence over the aristocracy and the 
manufacturing classes! I do not follow that 
argument. I have seen nothing in England or 
America or Ireland or France to convince me that 
if the small farmers and the wage-earners in the 
towns were authoritative they would be any more 
democratic than the aristocratic or the manufac- 
turing classes. I have seen much to make me 
feel certain that they will use their authority as 
implacably in their own interests as any aristocrat 
or manufacturer ever used or ever will use his. 
Mr. G. K. Chesterton, in his book, "Irish Impres- 
sions," produces this argument in favour of 
peasant proprietorship: 

[41] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

It may be that international Israel will launch against 
us out of the East an insane simplification of the unity of 
Man, as Islam once launched out of the East an insane 
simplification of the unity of God. If it be so, it is 
where property is well distributed that it will be well de- 
fended. The post of honor will be with those who fight 
in very truth for their own land. 

It is indisputable that a peasant will fight for 
his own land, the tiny portion which he owns and 
cultivates, but will he fight for another man's land 
when that man is unjustly to be bereft of it? 
There is nothing meritable in a man who fights for 
his own goods and lands, nor does it seem to me 
that a peasant will fight for his potato-patch with 
any greater determination than a share holder in a 
railroad will fight for the interest on his capital. 
There certainly is not anything more noble or 
chivalrous in the peasant's desire to keep posses- 
sion of his means of livelihood than there is in that 
of the Liberty Bondholder. The test of honour 
is, not what will you do for yourself, but what will 
you do for other men? The French peasant pro- 
prietors, the Pennsylvania Dutch, the Irish peasant 
proprietors may offer a guarantee of stability to 
society, but the offer may carry with it obstinate 

[42] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

reaction and a gross disregard of the rights of 
those who are not possessors of land. It will not 
guarantee the landless man against exploitation in 
the price of food in times of war and necessity. It 
offers singularly little hope that "national ideals" 
will be spread in wide commonalty, if the peasants 
can help it. "A. E." will urge, perhaps, that 
while "national ideals are the possession of a few 
people only," they may be spread in wide common- 
alty if the "few people" will make the effort to 
spread them. The soil lies ready for the seed. 
But what is there in human affairs to justify any 
man in assuming that the mass of men are likely 
to be long-suffering in idealism? Is it not a fact 
of human nature that even when the multitude has 
been stirred to some act of exaltation, the staying 
power of the multitude has not been sufficient to 
maintain the exalted mood long enough to render 
the reactionaries hopeless? Where are the gen- 
erous ideals of 1914 now? Has not the war that 
was to end war made war seem more probable? 
Is not the world at this moment suffering to the 
point of distraction because the multitude cannot 
live up to its own ideals long enough to make them 
practical? "The gods departed," says "A. E.", 

[43] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

"the half-gods also, hero and saint after that, and 
we [i. e. the Irish people] have dwindled down to 
a petty peasant nationality, rural and urban life 
alike mean in their externals." But he does not 
despair. "Yet the cavalcade, for all its tattered 
habiliments, has not lost spiritual dignity." And 
he hopes "the incorruptible atom" in us will make 
us great again. Divine optimism, but what is 
there in peasant society to justify it? 



VI 



And here I make a wide digression to dis- 
course on nationalism and peasant states. The 
world conspires to believe that the spirit of nation- 
ality is a desirable one, filling men with the purest 
ideals; but we begin to realize now that the spirit 
of nationality, while it has animated many noble 
men and brought them to a condition of extraor- 
dinary selflessness, more often reduces a race to 
a state of mean brutality and insufferable smug- 
ness. The self-satisfaction of a Sinn Feiner is as 
sickening as the ruffianly behaviour of a Black-and- 
Tan, and the outrages committed by the former 
are more despicable than the outrages of the lat- 

[44] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

ter, because the Black-and-Tan makes no pretences 
about himself, whereas the Sinn Feiner covers his 
blackguardly behaviour with a cloak of virtuous na- 
tionalism and high ideals. What is there to choose 
between the Sinn Feiners who seized an old man 
of seventy and dragged him from a tram-car in 
Dublin and murdered him in the presence of ter- 
rorized Irishmen (not one of whom had the com- 
mon pluck to risk his life in an effort to save him) 
and the Black-and-Tans who dragged the Mayor 
of Limerick from his bed and brutally murdered 
him? What is there to choose between the noble- 
minded Sinn Feiners who took old Mrs. Lindsay, a 
woman of more than seventy years, and shot her 
and her aged servant dead because she had done 
what any spirited woman would do, warned sol- 
diers who were on her side, that they were walking 
into an ambush — what is there to choose between 
them and the Orangemen who threw bombs into the 
midst of little Catholic children playing games in 
Belfast? What is there to choose between the 
Sinn Feiners who murdered four sick men (one of 
them dying of pleurisy) in their beds in a Galway 
hospital and the Orangemen who murdered the Mc- 
Mahon family in Belfast? Very little. If one 

[45] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

side is more condemnable than the other, it is 
those who, professing noble motives, practice foul 
deeds. One may, perhaps, find excuses for the 
evil acts of men whose minds are inflamed with 
patriotic emotions which cannot be found for a 
civilized government committing similar deeds of 
atrocity. Murder by the former may be less rep- 
rehensible than murder by the latter, but the dif- 
ference between them is too slight to be worthy 
of consideration. Murder remains murder, 
whether it be done for imperial or national pur- 
poses, and I confess to feeling more respect for 
the plain Black-and-Tan, making no bones about 
his brutality and his murders, than I do for the 
Sinn Feiner who commits crimes and calls them 
acts of virtue. "A. E.'s" restless ploughman may 
pause and turn and wonder, but is more likely 
to find himself, "deep beneath his rustic habit" a 
Sinn Fein gunman than "a king." I do not know 
how "the incorruptible atom" is to be developed 
in men who have made a virtue of crime and 
covered up their infamies with hypocrisy; and "A. 
E." amazingly omits to tell us how it is to be done. 
We Irish people — and I am as Irish in my ori- 
gins and emotions as any man — suffer from the sin 

[46] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

which afflicts all subject peoples: the sin of self- 
pity; and I desire self-government for Ireland, 
not because I believe that the Irish people can 
govern themselves better than the English have 
governed them — I take leave to doubt that when 
I remember the achievements of the Irish in Amer- 
ica — but because I can see no hope of the Irish 
people acquiring a sense of reality until they have 
freed themselves from the complacency, the smug' 
ness, the self-satisfaction, the self-pity which are 
inevitable in subject peoples. When they have dis- 
covered the truth about themselves, they may be 
able to govern themselves. And the truth about 
the Irish people, whether they be Protestant or 
Catholic, from the North or the South, is that they 
are a brutal, cruel, greedy, mean and treacherous 
people who have humbugged the rest of the world 
into the belief that they are a faithful, generous, 
high-minded, kindly, noble and tolerant race. We 
have our virtues, but by our insufferable content- 
ment with ourselves we have made vices of them. 
Our literature, particularly our modern literature, 
plainly reveals the truth about us. Synge, Padraic 
Colum, Lennox Robinson, Daniel Corkery, James 
Joyce — all these have shown us an Irish people 

[47] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

completely false to the world's common belief 
about them. I remember, when Mr. Robinson's 
bitter comedy, 'The White-Headed Boy," was first 
performed in London, being asked by an English 
dramatic critic whether I recognized my country- 
men in Mr. Robinson's characters. I said "Yes," 
and he replied in accents of disgust, "But they're 
horrible people! There isn't one of them for 
whom any decent person can feel sympathy! . . ." 
"Exactly," I said. And what our literature is now 
revealing, our acts and history have long made 
clear. We are at the culmination of centuries of 
oppression and cruel treatment. To the natural 
treachery and brutality of the Celt must be added 
the treachery and brutality which are provoked by 
misgovernment. The broad fact about us is that 
we have been so accustomed, by nature and by 
circumstances, to occasions of harsh and violent 
conduct that we find nothing startling in them, 
provided we can give them a patriotic gloss. Our 
satisfaction with ourselves is so intense that we 
imagine our little efforts in literature to be greater 
than those of the rest of the world. We prate 
incessantly about the ancient Gaelic literature, but 
are reluctant to produce the evidence for our boast- 

[48] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

ing. We forget that the Irishmen of distinction in 
literature, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Wilde, Shaw, 
Yeats, Moore and Synge, are not Celtic at all, but 
Anglo-Saxon in origin.* All of them, with the ex- 
ception of Mr. Moore, are Protestant, and even 
Mr. Moore became a Protestant. "A. E." him- 
self is an Ulster Protestant with a Scotch name. 
The O's and the Macs, who are reputed to be 
compounded of poetry and noble thoughts have 
furnished the world with little but soldiers, cattle- 
drivers, Sinn Fein gunmen and Tammany bosses. 
We have sponged upon the world, and the world 
is utterly sick of us. 

Our absorption in ourselves is so complete that 
we demand consideration for our academic griev- 
ances which rightly belongs to the ruined races of 
Europe. Ireland is the only country in the world 
which made a profit out of the War, yet her be- 
haviour during it was that of an hysterical woman 
who should rush into the presence of a man 
bleeding to death and exclaim, "My God, I've got 
toothache!" Millions of Russians are dying of dis- 

* Parnell, the greatest political leader the Irish Catholics have 
ever had, was a Protestant of Anglo-Saxon origin. Like Synge, 
he belonged to a family which came to Ireland originally from 
Cheshire in the North of England. 

[49] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

ease and hunger with less complaint than a Sinn 
Feiner makes about his obsolete language which 
he cannot speak, will not write and does not wish 
to learn. Millions of Austrians are without the 
elementary decencies of life, but they do not whine 
over their ills as Sinn Feiners whine over ills which 
they have not got. Snivelling and whining, in- 
deed, are the most obvious characteristics of the 
modem Irishman, Catholic or Protestant, added 
to an impudent demand that his affairs shall be 
treated as of greater consequence than those of 
the rest of mankind. 

To crown all, we are allowing ourselves to be 
dominated by peasant ideals: the little narrow de- 
mands of men who care only for their own inter- 
ests and not at all for their neighbours'. We have 
seen how the curse of nationality together with 
the curse of peasant principles have helped to ruin 
Europe. When we are asked to believe in "the 
incorruptible atom" of the peasant, we look to the 
Balkan States and see a foulness which spread a 
plague across a continent. When we are told of 
"the spiritual dignity" of the peasant community, 
we look to France and see a nation so corrupted 
with peasant greed and peasant fright that the 

[50] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

Peace Treaty threatens to be a more potent force 
for war and bloodshed than all the Kaisers that 
have ever lived put together. And when we are 
told that the patriotic peasant "deep beneath his 
rustic habit finds himself a king" we look to Ire- 
land and see young men, masked and armed, seiz- 
ing old, unarmed men and old, unarmed women 
and sick and dying men and little children, and 
brutally murdering them. These be your Gods, 
Israel. These be your high-minded patriots, your 
selfless peasants, your noble army of idealists! 

If we are to govern ourselves, we can only hope 
to do so manfully if we begin by humiliating our- 
selves before God and man. We have made 
claims on the world's regard which we are not en- 
titled to make and cannot maintain. If "the in- 
corruptible atom" is in our national being at all — 
if we are not a foul and cantankerous race destined 
by Almighty God to perish utterly from the earth 
because we are unfit to survive — then for each of 
us the principal purpose of life must be a pro- 
longed process of purification. We have sinned, 
we have sinned, we have sinned, but we have not 
repented. We have pretended that our sin was a 
virtue and have demanded admission to the society 

[51] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

of our betters on the plea that we are their equals, 
if not their superiors, when in fact we are not fit 
to be in their company at all; and our task now 
and for a long time must be the bitter one of 
acknowledging the truth to ourselves and striving 
to justify our boasting to other men. We have to 
rid ourselves of vain-glory and self-pity, of cant 
and humbug, of cruelty and hatred, of backbiting 
and slander, of false pride, of whining and snivel- 
ling, of corrupt living and a mean religion. There 
are evil things in our nature and more evil things 
in our circumstances which we must somehow sub- 
due if we are to come to equality with the civilized 
races of the world, but they will not be subdued un- 
til we have learned to acknowledge facts and have 
discovered that hatred is a device of the devil 
whereby men are destroyed and the world is made 
a wilderness. We can neither live nor let live 
until we have filled our hearts with love and char- 
ity. Nor will there be any hope in our lives 
until we have abandoned the mean divisions which 
keep the North Irishman in bitter enmity with the 
South Irishman. These two are necessary to each 
other, the first for his stability and judgment and 
governing ability, the second for his vision and 

[52] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

faith and docility. There are millions of Irish- 
men or men of Irish origin in the United States, 
yet no Irish Catholic or man of Irish Catholic ori- 
gin has risen to Presidency of his country. Three 
men of Ulster Protestant origin have done this. 
The Irish Catholic has given corrupt politics to 
America. He has not given anything else. The 
Ulster people, the only compact people in Ireland, 
whose blood has hardly been mingled with other 
blood in three centuries and more — there is not a 
drop of English blood in my veins, a claim which 
cannot easily be maintained by Irishmen south of 
the Boyne — contemplate the scene in Ireland now 
with misgiving and astonishment. They, whatever 
their faults, chose an Irishman for their leader, but 
the Sinn Feiners could not throw up from among 
themselves a man to lead them. They chose, first, 
an Englishman, called Padraic Pearse. They 
chose second, an American Jew, called De Valera, 
whose principal adviser is an Englishman, called 
Erskine Childers, whose domestic urge is his 
American wife, infatuated with the thought that 
she is the reincarnation of Joan of Arc. And the 
Ulstermen, free from dialectical intricacies, listen 
to the tortured, worn-out sentiments uttered by Mr. 

[53] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

De Valera, not in fear, but in contempt. That 
long, lean Jew, trained by Jesuits, possessed in 
double measure of the narrow, uninspired ideal- 
ism of his race and furnished with the casuistical 
devotion of his teachers, is an honest man, with 
cold, humourless, fanatical eyes, whose unrecep- 
tive mind guards itself against knowledge by bar- 
riers of bigotry, hatred, obstinacy, disbelief and 
self-deception. He has the dishonesty that is 
sometimes found in a very honest man, the dis- 
honesty one might expect to find in a man trained 
in a Jesuit school: for there are few acts of unscru- 
pulousness that he will not commit to achieve the 
end he devoutly desires. When he was asked on 
one occasion what his attitude would be to the Ul- 
ster people if they refused to give allegiance to an 
Irish Republic, he replied that he would blast 
Ulster from his path, unaware seemingly that blast- 
ing is a bad business in which more than one party 
can participate. I put the question to him myself 
in the Commodore Hotel in New York at a meeting 
of the League of Free Nations; and his reply was 
that he would present the Ulster people with these 
alternatives: they might remain in Ireland under 
the Republic or they might go out of Ireland al- 

[54] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

together with compensation for their property. It 
did not occur to Mr. De Valera that of these al- 
ternatives, Ulstermen would choose neither. How 
far he had considered the question of finance in- 
volved in schemes of compensation, I do not know, 
although I suspect his mind to be innocent of much 
financial knowledge; but I wonder how he would 
raise the money with which to compensate a single 
firm in Belfast, that of Harland and Wolff, the 
shipbuilders, if they elected to build their ships 
in Southampton; and I wonder still more how he 
would raise the men and the money to carry on 
those works after Harland and Wolff had taken 
themselves away! But such suppositions are idle, 
for Ulstermen will not let themselves be disturbed 
in their homes by one who is not their country- 
man. The story of my family in Ulster is typical 
of the story of hundreds and thousands of families 
there. All my forefathers, on my mother's side 
and my father's side, for three hundred years of 
which we have record and for a longer period of 
which we have incomplete records, were born and 
bred and buried in the County of Down, with the 
exception of my maternal grandfather who, al- 
though born and bred in Down, died and was bur- 

[55] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

ied in America. And we, so indigenous to the 
soil as that, are bidden to acknowledge Mr. De 
Valera for our President or clear out of our homes, 
although Mr. De Valera is an American citizen, 
born in New York, whose first act, if he were Presi- 
dent of the Irish Republic, would have to be one of 
naturalization! We will see Mr. De Valera 
damned first. This strange intruder into Irish pol- 
itics has brought in his trail a terrible procession 
of young men trained to take life lightly, to listen 
to no argument but that of the revolver; and the 
end of that procession is out of sight. It is more 
easy to train men to take life than it is to train them 
to preserve it. We cannot say to a man, "Thus far 
shalt thou kill, but no further!" and those whom 
we have taught to commit crime in the name of 
patriotism, may continue to commit crime for per- 
sonal profit. "And so, to the end of history," as 
Caesar says in Mr. Shaw's play "murder shall 
breed murder, always in the name of right and 
honour and peace, until the gods are tired of blood 
and create ^ race that can understand." 



[56] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 



VII 



Sometimes I say to myself that "A. E." has lived 
too long and too exclusively in Ireland. He is not 
free from the mush of sentimentality with which 
Irishmen regard themselves, this everlasting self- 
congratulation that Irishmen are not as English- 
men, this smug preoccupation with their own vir- 
tues and bland disregard of their vices, this eter- 
nal denial that they have any demerits. If the 
Irish people are to recover the dignity and the 
stature of the gods, they must display god-like 
qualities or prove that they possess them. It is not 
sufficient to assert that they possess these qualities, 
at the same time denying them by nagging con- 
tinually at their neighbours. I have wished at 
times that "A. E." could be removed from the 
atmosphere of adulation which envelopes him in 
Dublin, and sent, without letters of introduction, 
on a tour round the world. He has probably trav- 
elled less than any other educated man in Ireland. 
He passes from his home in Rathmines, a suburb 
of Dublin, to the office of the Irish Homestead in 
Merrion Square, from one centre of adulation to 
another, with occasional visits to the home of 

[57] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

James Stephens, where he meets the same people 
that visit him on Sunday nights, or to the Her- 
metic Society, where he meets them again. He is 
too fine a spirit to be seriously affected by the pal- 
try gabble of the third-rate minds he encounters on 
most occasions in Dublin, and perhaps it hardly 
matters that he seldom leaves Dublin and hardly 
ever leaves Ireland; but even so rare a man as 
"A. E." must suffer contraction within the narrow 
limits of Dublin. He has resources that few men 
possess: a quiet mind, a vivid faith and the love 
and respect of very dissimiliar people. He can 
turn from the consideration of agricultural prices 
in the Irish Homestead to the esoteric alphabet 
with which he speaks to the Gods, or he can go off 
to the mountains of Donegal and make pictures. 
When painting no longer delights him, he can 
spend his nights and days in making poems. He 
is extravagantly generous to young writers, giving 
greater praise to them sometimes than they deserve, 
giving less of criticism than is necessary. There 
are minor poets in Dublin, authors of thin books 
of thin verse, who have persuaded themselves, be- 
cause of "A. E's." praise, that they are more 
meritable than they are. There are people in Dub- 

[58] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

lin who seem to believe that Ireland has produced 
a greater literature than England and will de- 
nounce you as a traitor to your country if you pro- 
test that she cannot show poets of the stature of 
Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Keats 
Wordsworth, Browning and Tennyson, with the 
exception of Mr. Yeats. I am the sort of patriot 
who would like to see his country raise herself to 
the level of other countries, but I am not the sort 
of patriot who will pretend that she is on the 
level of England and France and Germany when, 
in fact, she is far below it. "A. E." is not entirely 
free from blame for this. He could have given 
Ireland a sense of proportion, had he cared to 
do so. 

VIII 

I have a picture by "A. E." of an ascending road 
on the side of a mountain. There is rain in the 
air, and the road has a lonely, unfrequented look. 
Yet, though there is no living creature visible in 
the picture, Life fills it. I feel sometimes when 
I sit back in my chair and look at "The Mountain 
Road" that there are divine beings behind the 

[59] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

bushes, that if I could only climb up that road 
and turn the comer of the mountain, I should come 
upon the Golden Age. Is it not ungracious to 
make complaint, even if the complaint be a slight 
one, of a man who can make the invisible world so 
powerfully felt as that? And if he persuades me, 
by nature sceptical, almost to believe in the Shin- 
ing Ones, how much more strong must his influence 
be on those who are eager to believe! When the 
evil temper which possesses Ireland at this moment 
has subsided, the fine temper of "A. E." will rise 
again and call Irishmen to a kindlier mood. The 
little town of Lurgan, in which he was born, is 
notorious in Ulster for the harshness of its reli- 
gious dissensions. A base bigotry flourishes there. 
It is in the nature of things that from a place of 
great bitterness should have come a man of re- 
conciliation, bidding Catholic and Protestant to 
meet, not in Geneva or in Rome, but on the holy 
hills of Ireland, under the protection of the ancient 
gods. 



[60] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



One night, some years before the outbreak of the 
European War, I arrived in the town of Hanley 
in the County of Stafford in the midlands, of Eng- 
land to deliver a lecture on some subject, the name 
of which I do not now remember, although I sus- 
pect it was connected with the general improve- 
ment of mankind. I had accepted the invitation 
to lecture in Hanley, not because I had anything 
of importance to say to its inhabitants, but be- 
cause I had lately read "The Old Wives' Tale" by 
Mr. Arnold Bennett, and was eager to see the place 
and the people from which that great book had 
sprung. My recollections of the visit are very 
vague now, but I remember that my host, a man 
of serious mind, a little over-weighted, perhaps, 
by the troubles of the universe, took me for a 
walk on Sunday morning through some of "the 
Five Towns," in the course of which he displayed 

[61] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

much knowledge of the topography of Mr. Ben- 
nett's books without displaying much knowledge 
of the books themselves. He informed me that 
the real name of "Trafalgar Road" in "The Old 
Wives' Tale" is "Waterloo Road" and that the fic- 
titious name of Hanley is "Hanbridge." He spec- 
ulated incuriously on the oddness which had 
caused Mr. Bennett to alter real names in this 
palpable manner, and ended his discourse with 
the statement that he seldom read novels (which 
he persisted in calling "Works of Fiction") being 
more inclined to the study of serious books. I 
learned that he read chiefly in the writings of 
sociologists and political economists and similar 
serious persons. I suggested to him that he 
might more profitably read novels than sociolog- 
ical books if he wished to discover something 
about human character. He was a polite and 
kindly man, and he did not abruptly tell me of my 
folly, but I could see that he considered me to be 
a fool or, at best, a flippant person, and I am sure 
that had he not been my host he would not have 
troubled to attend my lecture that evening. He 
smiled in the benign way men have when they ab- 
stain from expressing their frank opinion, as he 

[62] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

listened to me saying that he would find in novels 
a greater fund of information about human na- 
ture than he could hope to find in all the works that 
all the sociologists in the world have written. Men 
of affairs, I said, spend their lives in writing 
ponderous volumes on society which are out-of- 
date as soon as they are published, whereas the 
novel or the play of a man of genius remains true 
for ever. Henry Fielding and Adam Smith were 
contemporaries, but I imagine few will deny that 
there is more durable stuff, stuff more continuously 
applicable to human concerns, in "Tom Jones" 
than there is in "The Wealth of Nations." But my 
friend would have none of this, and seemed to think 
that any man who spent time in reading Fielding's 
novel which might be spent in reading Adam Smith 
was shamefully misusing his mind. He led me, I 
remember, through much of the territory which is 
generically known as "the Five Towns." I saw 
the Square in which the Baineses lived, and was 
told that although Mr. Bennett called it "St. Luke's 
Square" in "The Old Wives' Tale," the local au- 
thorities preferred to call it after St. John. So 
great was the influence of the novel upon me that 
when I peered through the window of the shop in 

[63] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

which, SO I was told, Constance and Sophia Baines 
were born, I almost expected to see the half -heroic 
figure of Samuel Povey behind the counter or to 
meet the cold, un-human glance of that frozen 
spinster. Miss Marie Insull, who once, and once 
only, displayed signs of human emotion — on the 
occasion when Mr. Critchlow brought her into the 
presence of the widowed Constance to announce 
his betrothal to her: 

The dog had leisurely strolled forward to inspect the 
edges of the fiance's trousers. Miss Insull summoned 
the animal with a noise of the fingers, and then bent 
down and caressed it. A strange gesture provmg the 
validity of Charles Critchlow's discovery that in Maria 
Insul a human being was buried. 

My host led me up stony streets, in which every 
sort of domestic architecture was visible — for "the 
Five Towns" are so independent that even in the 
workmen's houses there is no uniformity of style 
or harmony of design, a fact which makes, not for 
a pleasing diversity, but for shapelessness and 
incoherence — and pointed to places in the ground 
where, so he said, the earth had opened, owing to 
underground operations, and swallowed whosoever 
should happen to be passing over it. There was 

[64] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

a Story of a man who had set forth in the morning 
to go to his work, but, before he had travelled 
many yards from his home, was suddenly consumed 
by the opening earth and was never seen again. I 
will admit that I trod those streets thereafter with 
trepidation and considerable care! I had begun 
to tire of the ugly houses with their insufferable 
architecture, and of the grime caused by innumer- 
able chimneys emitting thick, black smoke, when I 
was led up a steep street at the top of which I was 
told to halt and gaze about me. I saw the whole 
of "the Five Towns" and much of the surrounding 
country spread out like the kingdoms of the world 
and realized how strangely moving such a scene 
can be because of its suggestion of human pres- 
ences. It was not without beauty, in spite of the 
gloom of an industrial area, but it impressed me 
most by its air of effort and power and achieve- 
ment. I became conscious of the activities of men 
and women, of great labours, of confused strivings 
out of which some human need is satisfied, and I 
came away, as I always come away from such 
sights, immensely impressed by human organiza- 
tion and very satisfied with great machines. When 
we had descended from that high street and had 

[65] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

walked elsewhere, I found myself suddenly con- 
fronting a railway station on which I saw the ro- 
mantic name of etruria. 



II 



Etruria, the country of the Etruscans in Italy, 
was, I suppose, a very different place from Etruria, 
the small town between Hanley and Burslem 
("Hanbridge" and "Bursley") vfhere Josiah 
Wedgwood founded his pottery in the eighteenth 
century, but the spirit which produced the Etruscan 
ceramics was not dissimilar from the spirit which 
produces the famous Wedgwood ware; and I 
thought to myself as I looked at the romantic name 
of that grimy-looking town in Staffordshire that I 
had stumbled on the secret of Mr. Bennett. Un- 
derneath the plain appearance of the pottery town, 
there is a spirit which has persisted in the produc- 
tion of beautiful things for the best part of two 
centuries, a spirit so much in love with delicate 
ware that it calls an unsightly town by the name of 
an ancient and reputedly beautiful one ; and under- 
neath the hard and fact-ridden style of Mr. Bennett 
there is an ineradicable desire for romance. I 

[66] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

said of him once that he fights the battles of the 
romantic with the weapons of the realist, and that 
description seems to me to be strictly accurate. 
Mr. Bennett mingles, even in his Christian names, 
the gritty and the graceful in a way that is sin- 
gularly characteristic of the people of his district. 
"Enoch Arnold Bennett" is a combination of names 
not easily imagined, but it is not more unusual 
than the combination of Etruria and Staffordshire, 
of lovely ceramics and "the Five Towns." Mr. 
Bennett has many times been charged with addic- 
tion to dusty realism, a dull love of facts. His 
critics say of him, after reading such a book as 
"Your United States," that he must have spent his 
time on the liner in which he went to America in 
counting the rivets in her plates for the sheer love 
of counting them, and they conclude that he is 
a materialist because of his interest in numbers 
and in things. They even complain of him that he 
is infatuated with largeness, just as Queen Vic- 
toria was, and that he imagines a thing to be 
good when it is merely big. This is undiscerning 
criticism. It is as if a child were charged with be- 
ing a disciple of Haeckel because it thinks that ten 
things are more wonderful than one thing. We 

[67] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

may think that Mr. Bennett is a fact-ridden modern, 
incapable of romance, because he inordinately ad- 
mires electricity, but to do so is to announce our- 
selves as dunderheads for not discovering that his 
love of electricity is the Romantic's love of the 
Magic Lamp! How easily most of us are dis- 
suaded from our faith in romantic things! We 
are in ecstasies when we hear of St. Francis of 
Assisi preaching to the fishes and the birds and 
addressing them as little brothers, but we are 
horribly shocked and humiliated when Mr. Ber- 
nard Shaw makes the mad priest in "John Bull's 
Other Island" speak of a pig as our little brother! 
There is prettiness in the community of men and 
birds, even of men and the smaller fish, but pigs — 
pork! ! We find romance in the spectacle of a 
man rubbing a dirty lantern with his fingers 
in order to summon up a serving genie, but can- 
not perceive the greater romance found by Mr. 
Bennett in the spectacle of a man pressing a switch 
and illuminating a room with power drawn by wires 
from a station many miles away! We are en- 
chanted with the thought of transport on Magic 
Carpets, but unmoved by the thought that pres- 
ently great ships will be guided into New York 

[68] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

Harbour, not by pilots, but by means of wireless 
telegraphy! Some dullards have exclaimed des- 
pairingly of Mr. Bennett because of what they 
called his trivial and commonplace interests as 
revealed in that enthralling book, "Things That 
Have Interested Me," failing utterly to discern 
that it is his interest in these things which is so 
infallible a sign of his zest for life. Any one can 
be interested in the Rocky Mountains, but it is 
only a superbly romantic man who can be absorbed 
in Tarrytown. There is net anything in the round 
world, made by God or by man, which does not in- 
terest Mr. Bennett. Familiarity breeds contempt 
in most of us, but it does not breed contempt in him. 
He never gets used to things. Most of us are too 
dull of mind, too destitute of imagination to feel 
interest or astonishment unless we are abruptly con- 
fronted with the unusual or the violent, and our 
capacity for romantic enjoyment is limited and 
soon exhausted. We would exclaim with astonish- 
ment on beholding an eruption of Mount Vesuvius 
for the first time, but we would exclaim rather less 
on perceiving the ninety-ninth eruption. Mr. Ben- 
nett would experience as much excitement on the 
ninety-ninth occasion as he would on the first, 

[69] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

Nothing less than an earthquake is necessary to stir 
some of us, but Mr. Bennett can be stirred by the 
sight of a taxicab. The genesis of "The Old 
Wives' Tale," as described in the preface to one of 
the later editions, is a clear illustration of his ro- 
mantic possession: 

In the autumn of 1903 [he writes], I used to dine 
frequently in a restaurant in the Rue de Clichy, Paris. 
Here were, among .others, two waitresses that attracted 
my attention. One was a beautiful, pale young girl, to 
whom I never spoke, for she was employed far away 
from the table I affected. The other, a stout, middle- 
aged, managing Breton woman, had sole command over 
my table and me, and gradually she began to assume 
such a maternal tone towards me that I saw I should 
be compelled to leave that restaurant. If I was absent 
for a couple of nights running she would reproach me 
sharply: "What! you are unfaithful to me?" Once 
when I complained about some French beans, she in- 
formed me roundly that "French beans were a subject 
which I did not understand. ..." 

I break the quotation here to exclaim at the 
obtuseness of that Breton woman who, in the course 
of her management of Mr. Bennett, failed to dis- 
cover that he loves to regard himself as an au- 
thority on such matters as French beans. There 

[70] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

is a kind of romantic pride which makes some 
men believe that they know the one place in a 
city where the best brand of a particular article 
is to be purchased. Mr. Bennett has that pride. 
The heaviness of the IBreton's blow to it can be 
imagined after reading the next sentence in the 
passage from which I am making the quotation: 

I then decided to be eternally unfaithful to her, and I 
abandoned the restaurant. A fev/ nights before the final 
parting an old woman came into the restaurant to dine. 
She was fat, shapeless, ugly and grotesque. She had a 
ridiculous voice and ridiculous gestures. It was easy 
to see that she lived alone, and that in the long lapse of 
years she had developed the kind of peculiarity which 
induces guffaws among the thoughtless. She was bur- 
dened wi'th a lot of small parcels which she kept drop- 
ping. She chose one seat; and then, not liking it, chose 
another; and then another. In a few moments she had 
the whole restaurant laughing at her. That my middle- 
aged Breton should laugh was indifferent to me, but I 
was pained to see a coarse grimace of giggling on the 
pale face of the beautiful young waitress to whom I 
had never spoken. I reflected, concerning the grotesque 
diner: This woman was once young, slim, perhaps 
beautiful; certainly free from these ridiculous manner- 
isms. Very probably she is unconscious of her singu- 
larities. Her case is a tragedy. One ought to be able 

[71] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

to make a heartrending novel out of the history of a 
woman such as she. Every stout, ageing woman is not 
grotesque — far from it! — but there is an extreme pathos 
in the mere fact that every stout, ageing woman was once 
a young girl with the unique charm of youth in her form 
and movements and in her mind. And the fact that the 
change from the young girl to the stout, ageing woman 
is made up of an infinite number of infinitesimal 
changes, each unperceived by her, only intensifies the 
pathos. It was at that instant that I was visited by the 
idea of writing the book which ultimately be^came "The 
Old Wives' Tale." . . . 



Ill 



In that passage there is revealed much, I think, 
of Mr. Bennett's character and spirit. He dis- 
likes the sensation of being managed because he 
likes the sensation of managing. The Breton 
woman could have won him to faithful service for 
ever if she had deferred to him in the matter of 
French beans, and who knows what tricks of du- 
plicity she could have played upon him had she 
stooped to guile? But she wounded him in his 
pride when she bluntly told him that her judg- 
ment on beans was sounder than his, and thus 
lost the custom of the most interesting of her 
[72] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

diners. The first fact, therefore, that one dis- 
covers in this passage is that Mr. Bennett has a 
profound respect for his own opinion: he feels 
pretty sure of himself. This may be considered 
to be a sign of conceit, but that consideration is 
not necessarily true. It could only be a sign of 
conceit if Mr. Bennett's respect for his own opin- 
ion were misplaced, and there is nothing in his 
record to show that it is misplaced. There is, 
on the contrary, much to show that it is placed 
with the utmost propriety. He has done many of 
the things which he said he would do, and has done 
them exceedingly well. If all of us could have 
faith in ourselves with as much justification as 
Mr. Bennett has faith in himself, we would do 
well to practice our faith with fervour. The second 
fact about Mr. Bennett which is revealed by this 
passage is the romantic nature of him, but before 
I discuss it, I wish to point out a third and minor 
fact which is something of a flaw in him, not an 
important flaw, but one which must be remembered 
by his admirers. It is his occasional tendency to 
let his romanticism degenerate into sentimentality. 
Observe how he seems to have romanced about the 
pale and beautiful waitress to whom he never 

[73] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

spoke, how he assumes that because she is beautiful 
she must also be generous and sympathetic and 
kindly, with what dismay he discovers that, just as 
a man can smile and smile and be a villain, so a 
woman can be pale and beautiful, and yet be as 
cruel or lacking in perception as the ruddiest and 
least lovely of her sex. He declares, indeed, that 
he quitted the restaurant in the Rue de Clichy be- 
cause of the insolence of the Breton woman who 
disputed his authority on beans, but may he not 
be deceiving himself, may he not in fact have 
quitted that place because his illusion about the 
beautiful, pale young waitress was shattered by her 
coarse grimaces, her unkindly giggles? After all, 
it is easy enough to live with those who will not 
accept our estimate of ourselves, but how hard it 
is to live with lost beliefs. One of the most pain- 
ful things about shell-shock cases resulting in men- 
tal derangement is that the patient seems to loathe 
most those whom he formerly loved most, and here 
in England many of us knov/ of pitiful women who 
dare not go to see their unbalanced husbands be- 
cause the mere sight of them throws the unhappy 
men into paroxysms of rage and anguish! . . , 
But it is when we come to consider Mr. 
[74] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

Bennett's attitude towards the foolish old woman 
who changed her seat and dropped her parcels so 
often in the restaurant in the Rue de Clichy that 
we discover his chief characteristic. If he were 
the fact-ridden realist that some of his critics 
pronounce him to be, he could not possibly have 
perceived in that old woman, "fat, shapeless, ugly 
and grotesque," the lineaments of a girl, "young, 
slim, perhaps beautiful; certainly free from these 
ridiculous mannerisms." A fact-ridden realist 
might not have joined in the laughter of the 
Breton woman and the giggling pale waitress, but 
he would have judged the old woman with harsh 
contempt, more intolerable even than mocking 
laughter, and he would have turned away from 
her in irritation and disgust because of her ineffi- 
ciency, her clumsiness, her indecision, her displeas- 
ing exterior. At best, he would have seen her 
solely as a fat, ugly and grotesque person who 
had always been incompetent, fat, ugly and gro- 
tesque. But Mr. Bennett, incorrigibly romantic, 
regarding her closely and with kindliness, insists 
that beneath the hulk of her body there is a soul, 
that the too, too solid flesh once wore "the 
feature of blown youth," even as Ophelia found 

[75] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

it in Hamlet! She may not be beautiful now, he 
tells himself, but how beautiful may she not once 
have been. That is the spirit of romance. It is 
a certain sign of the romantic in a man that he 
will not permit himself to be bluffed by appear- 
ances when appearances are bad, although he may 
often be bluffed by them when they are good. 
Mr. Bennett was not deceived by the old woman's 
looks, but he was terribly deceived by the looks 
of the pale, young waitress, and it is true of him, 
I think, that he is very easily deceived by youth, 
to which he is uncommonly generous. Observe 
how he shows his willingness to be deceived by 
youth in the passage which I have quoted. He 
tells himself that the old woman was once "young, 
slim, perhaps beautiful," which is likely enough, 
but he goes on, not romantically, but sentiment- 
ally, to add, that she was "certainly free from these 
ridiculous mannerisms." Now, there is no war- 
rant in human experience for such an assumption. 
I am prepared to believe that an old woman, "fat, 
shapeless, ugly and grotesque" was once "slim, 
perhaps beautiful," but I am not prepared to be- 
lieve that an indecisive, footling old woman was, 
in her girlhood, any other than indecisive and 

[76] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

footling. We do not change our natures to that 
extent as we grow older unless we lose our wits 
or suffer gravely in health, and the tragedy of old 
age is that habits and mannerisms which are 
charming and attractive in youth are merely silly 
and annoying in age. We are amused by the 
violent opinions of a clever young man of twenty, 
inclined even to applaud him for holding them 
because they are significant of an active and de- 
veloping mind, but they are less amusing to us and 
win less applause if they are still being expressed 
by him when he is thirty. We cease altogether 
to applaud or be amused when we hear him still 
at them when he is forty. We no longer describe 
him as a clever young man, but a damned fool. 
No one has any right to be a clever young man all 
his life. The law should forbid any one to be a 
clever young man after the age of twenty-seven. 
The world is entitled to demand that its clever 
young men shall grow up and achieve some sort 
of sanity and right judgment by the age of thirty, 
and if they refuse to grow up, then they are not 
free to complain if the world revises its judg- 
ment on them and inexorably thrusts them from 
its regard. Mr. Bennett's old woman dropped 

[77] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

her parcels and changed her seat just as frequently 
in her youth as she did on that evening when he 
saw her in the Rue de Glichy, but she was young 
and perhaps pretty then, and people forgave her 
for her footling ways because of her youthfulness 
and in the hope that someday she would acquire 
steadiness of character and control over her pack- 
ages. I think I can give a fairly accurate de 
scription of that old v/oman when she was a girl 
She was always late for everything, but her de 
mure ways and a sort of foal-like clumsiness abou 
her made men willing to wait and be gracious 
about it. She always remembered at the last 
moment nineteen different things which she had 
forgotten to do, which must immediately be done, 
which inevitably caused greater delay. She could 
never find her railway ticket when the inspector 
came round to examine it and frequently held up 
trains while every one in her carriage hunted high 
and low for it. She persistently dropped her 
gloves, her handkerchief smd her vanity-bag or left 
them behind her wherever she v/ent. She never 
v/ent out of doors without losing something. She 
never had any small change, and invariably tend- 
ered a ten-dollar bill, when buying a ten-cent news- 

[78] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

paper, in the fond belief that the clerk at the news 
stand or even the boy in the street was certain to 
have plenty of change and be all too eager to 
oblige her. She always got on to the wrong train 
or trolley-car and did not discover her mistake 
until too late to dismount from it! . . . But 
she succeeded in putting over that sort of fatuous 
behaviour on the strength of her youth and pretti- 
ness; and men, who would go raving mad if they 
had to live with a middle-aged or elderly woman 
of such habits, readily excused her imbecilities 
because the'y were those of youth. 

I wondered often, v/hen I was in America, why 
I saw so many old or middle-aged husbands v/ith 
girl-wives. People told me that the cost of living 
is so high in America that young men cannot afford 
to marry young girls, but must either marry older 
and richer women or refrain from marriage until 
they are middle-aged. Young women, so I was 
told, must marry the elderly and the bald, the slack 
and the flabby because, otherwise, they cannot 
hope for a good time until they are no longer of an 
age to enjoy it. I do not much esteem young 
women who refuse the great adventure of marriage 
with young, poor men in order that they may have 

,[79] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

a good time with unenthusiastic, tamed and middle- 
aged men, especially when I remember that a 
good time in such circumstances means only a 
fatly comfortable one, being well-fed, well-housed 
and well-clothed without ever having had the fun 
of fighting for such comforts. But I am not en- 
tirely convinced by the arguments which were put 
to me in explanation of this singular and unnatural 
conjunction of the young and the middle-aged. 
There may be truth in the statement that American 
girls marry elderly men for the comfort they 
receive, but I doubt whether the elderly men 
marry for that reason. I am very certain that 
such marriages are made because the men are 
romantic and will not believe that the young girFs 
"charming ways" will not be retained by her when 
she is no longer young. The plain and undeniable 
fact is that elderly men marry girls because they 
cannot believe that a girl who has foolish habits 
will not cease to have them when she is older. The 
romantic is a man who is everlastingly hoping for 
the best, everlastingly striving to obtain the best. 
A romantic realist is a man who, while striving 
for the best, knows that he may only obtain the 
worst. The sentimentalist is a man who removes 

[80] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

himself from the region of reality and refuses to 
admit that there is a worst, who insists that all is 
for the best in the best of all possible v/orlds. 
Mr. Arnold Bennett is a romantic realist, with a 
slight tendency towards sentimental ism. 



IV 



His romantic realism seems to plunge desper- 
ately into sentimentalism when he contemplates 
very old age and death. Dr. Johnson had a strange 
horror of death, "so much so. Sir," as he said to 
Boswell, "that the whole of life is but keeping away 
the thoughts of it." But he achieved quietness 
of mind when his end came and his last recorded 
words were of a benignant character. "God bless 
you, my dear!" he said to Miss Morris, forbidden 
by his faithful negro servant, Francis, to come 
nearer to his bed than the outer room. Mr. 
Bennett seldom, if ever, permits his very old people 
to die placidly. Their disappointments press 
hardly upon them, if they are not prevented from 
remembering them by senility or gross disease. 
Paralysis claims many of them. Age does not 
beautify them nor bring peace to them, nor do 

[81] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

they face their end with undiminished heads. He 
is remarkably consistent in this view of old age 
and death, and perhaps it is natural that he should 
regard it so gloomily when one remembers how 
completely he is enthralled by youth. But his 
view is an unbalanced one. 

Old age is not always graceless and crabbed 
and unlovely. Such an old man as Mr. Thomas 
Hardy has a grace and quietness and courage dis- 
coverable only in those who have endured many 
things but have not been conquered by them. Mr. 
Bennett, however, looks upon age as a calamity 
which must, indeed, happen to all of us, if we live 
long enough, but cannot possibly be mitigated. 

He is able to detect the "young, slim, perhaps 
beautiful" girl in the "fat, shapeless, ugly and 
grotesque" old woman, but he cannot so easily 
detect the gracious old man or woman in the boy 
and girl. I am oppressed sometimes by the 
thought that if Mr. Bennett had seen the "young, 
slim, perhaps beautiful" girl, his romantic nature 
would have let him down, yielding place to his 
cynicism, and he would have detected the coming 
wrinkles on her brow, v/ould have seen that her 
eyes would grow dull, might even have pointed 

[82] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

out her tendency to obesity. "Of course, I 
should!" Mr. Bennett may retort, "for I am a 
realist as well as a romantic, and in this case, I 
should have been right!" And so he would, but 
the trouble is that, while Mr. Bennett romantically 
and rightly sees the slim, perhaps beautiful girl 
in the fat old woman, he always realistically and 
wrongly sees the fat old woman in the slim young 
girl! I think that the spirit of "the Five Towns" 
is entirely responsible for the fact that Mr. Bennett 
never sees beauty in age. It is a harsh, acquisi- 
tive spirit, busy principally in the accumulation 
of material things (despite the fact that it pro- 
duces lovely pottery) and inclined to measure a 
man's worth by the amount of his fortune. The 
leisurely and gracious things of life are not the 
immediate or even the ultimate concerns of life in 
"the Potteries," and old age is likely, in such 
places, to be harsh and acquisitive. When men 
and women, who have spent their activities en- 
tirely in money-making, reach the age at which 
they possess much money but are no longer able 
to employ themselves in its acquisition, they be- 
come crabbed, unlovely, mean, for they have no 
resources. You cannot derive pleasure from 

[83] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

literature or music or painting or any other art 
when you bring to its consideration only the fag- 
end of your life. One has seen men who were 
notorious among their neighbours for their hard 
work — always engaged in their employment from 
early morning until late night — seldom, if ever, 
resting or taking holiday. One has seen these 
men, after they have retired from business, so 
helpless without their work to occupy their minds 
that they steadily declined into a condition of 
misery which brought about premature death! 
They lived for one thing, and when that thing was 
no longer available for them, they perished be- 
cause they had no other resources and it was too 
late to acquire any! Mr. Bennett must have seen 
such men many times during his early years 
in "the Five Towns" and the pitiful spectacle so 
impressed his mind that old age has become to him 
a terrifying thing, a complete debacle of the brain 
and energies. This life, this youth, is so wonder- 
ful, so full of romantic possibilties, that age and 
death seem to him merely obscene interruptions 
of an enthralling spectacle. 



[84] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 



Once only, so far as I can discover, did he make 
a poem. It was published in The English Review 
in the brave days when that magazine was edited 
by Mr. Ford Madox Huefifer, and since it is sing- 
ularly characteristic, as a poem ought to be, of its 
author's outlook on life, I quote it here in full. 
But first I must affirm my belief that The English 
Review, under the editorship of Mr. Hueffer, was 
the greatest magazine that this world has ever 
known. That is a tremendous title to claim for 
any magazine, but I doubt whether any one, famil- 
iar with great magazines, will seriously dispute 
it. The title of Mr. Bennett's poem is "Town and 
Country." Here it is: 

God made the country, and man made the town. 
And so — man made the doctor, God the clown; 
God made the mountain, and the ants their hill, 
Where grinding servitudes each day fulfil. 
God doubtless made the flowers, while in the hive 
Unnatural bees against their passions strive. 
God made the jackass and the bounding flea; 
I render thanks to God that man made me. 
Let those who recognize God's shaping power 

[85] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

Here but not there, in tree but not in tower, 

In lane and field, but not in street and square. 

And in man's work see nothing that is fair — 

Bestir their feeble fancy to the old 

Conception of a "country" made by God; 

Wliere birds perceive the wickedness of strife 

Against the winds, and lead the simple life 

Nestless on God's own twigs; and squirrels, free 

From carking care, exist through February 

On nuts that God has stored. Let them agree 

To leave the fields to God for just a year, 

And then of God's own harvest make good cheer. 

If one were a sentimentalist, one could describe 
that poem as a sign of a blankly materialistic 
mind, with a turn for blasphemy, but if one is what 
one ought to be, a romantic with a sense of reality, 
it will apr>ear to be a confession of faith in God 
and man. 



VI 



Mr. Bennett, of all the men of letters with whom 
I am acquainted, not even excluding Mr. Shaw, 
is the most generous and kindly to young people. 
Mr. Wells likes young people, but his interest 
in them is curiously imDersonal. He likes youth 

[86] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

in a lump, so to speak, rather than youth in the 
individual, just as he seems to love mankind more 
than he likes any man. But Mr. Bennett likes 
you, the youth, personally. He is happier on the 
whole with young people than he is with their el- 
ders, and he assiduously seeks their society. He is 
amused by their extravagances, but not to the ex- 
tent of sneering at them. He likes youth to be 
dandiacal, to have an air, to be arrogant, but not 
to be ill-bred or pretentious or third-rate. In 
spite of his notable kindness, he can be merciless 
to humbugs, and stories are told of devastating 
things said by him to presumptuous persons and 
fools. The blunt speech of "the Five Towns" 
is native to his tongue, and he passes judgment 
without mincing his words. He has a dry sort 
of wit which is remarkably helped by a slight 
hesitation in his speech, and his general conver- 
sation, without being markedly distinguished, is 
entertaining and agreeable in a way that is very 
elusive when put upon paper. It is natural, 
perhaps, that a man who loves youth so much as 
he does should have a more potent sense of the 
present and of the future than of the past, and 
this accounts for the fact that his books and 

[87] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

pictures are chiefly modem. I imagine that he 
has a greater number of books and pictures by 
young authors and painters than any other man 
of his calibre in England. He loves music, but 
is not "highbrow" about it, and he has a passion 
for dancing which threatens now to keep him 
jigging through ballrooms for the rest of his life. 
He paints quite charming water-colour pictures, 
and is so fond of the sea that the surest way in 
which any one can lose his friendship is to accom- 
pany him for a trip on his yacht and be sea-sick 
during it! He is a keen man of business, and he 
is full of contempt for the rather sloppy-minded 
man of letters who allows himself to be worsted 
in a bargain. Most men of quality are lonely men, 
oddly isolated in spirit, and Mr. Bennett is not 
an exception to the rule, but more than his com- 
peers, I think, he is a companionable person in 
a small group, chiefly because of that romantic 
interest he has in all things, animate and inani- 
mate. He has a wider knowledge of books than 
most men of letters. Most men of letters, indeed, 
are remarkably ignorant of books. And he has 
the courage, the supreme courage, to do what 
no other literary man I have ever met has the 

[88] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

courage to do: he keeps a gramophone. He likes 
the savor of life, and life for him includes the 
pictures of Corot and the gramophone and French 
poetry and the novels of George Moore and news- 
papers and motor-cars and Balzac and Bernard 
Shaw and the right brand of French beans. How 
can such a man help being romantic! 



[89] 



G. K. CHESTERTON 



There is a legend, much beholden to Shake- 
speare, that learning and leanness are akin to each 
other, while dull wits flourish in company with 
obesity. The curious submission sometimes made 
by Shakespeare to common prejudices and igno- 
rance, glorified by the name of legend, caused 
him too often to forget the obligation of the aristo- 
crat to think for him.self, and remember only to 
think with the mob ; and the singular fact about this 
forgetfulness of his is that when he chose to think 
with the mob, he nearly always did so when the 
the mob was in the wrong. He preferred the judg- 
ment of the street to the judgment of informed 
minds when he wrote "Richard the Third," and al- 
lowed himself to malign that excellent and most 
capable prince and monarch. Richard was one of 
the ablest of the kings of England, but Shake- 
speare, forgetting his obligations to his own 

[90] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

genius, portrays him as a pervert with a mania 
for blood. He yields to the common view in his 
references to fat men. Falstaff is fat and flighty 
and a coward, a drunkard, a braggart and a mis- 
leader of young princes, although the prototype 
of Sir John was himself a man of known courage. 
Cassius was deemed to think too much because 
he had a lean and hungry look. Julius Caesar 
desired the society of fat men who, presumably, 
indulged but seldom in thought and never in any 
that could be called dangerous. Fat men are en- 
dowed with but one tolerable virtue: that of good 
nature; and if any fat men ever enters heaven, 
it will be because of his equable temper and in 
spite of his corpulence. 

Mr. Chesterton is a fat man. There is a rumour 
in England that many Americans felt they had 
been defrauded of their money when they went to 
hear him lecture lately because he v/as hardly 
so fat as they had been led to believe! He cer- 
tainly is not so bulky nov/, because of a serious 
illness, as he was when I first knew him, but in 
those days he was undeniably an enormous man. 
And in himself he is a complete refutation of the 
legend that fat men are dull men. Dr. Johnson 

[91] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

was another fat man whose large flesh covered a 
large intellect. Dr. Johnson, indeed, was so able a 
man that, in spite of an incorrigibly lazy character, 
which kept him abed of mornings when he ought 
to have been improving the shining hour, he com- 
piled a dictionary with little assistance which, so 
Frenchmen said, would have engaged the labours of 
forty French scholars for a long time. 

These legends about men of wit and dull men 
need to be revised. There have been as many fat 
men of genius as there have been lean men of 
genius. There have been as many epicurean 
geniuses as there have been ascetic geniuses. My 
experience is that men of great mental energy are 
fonder of their food than many men with torpid 
minds; and some of the ablest men I know are 
excessively addicted to the pleasures of the table. 
Mr. Shaw is a fastidious feeder, with odd likes and 
dislikes, but no one could say that he is indif- 
ferent to what he eats. It is, I think, an ironic 
commentary on the legend that fat men are lack- 
ing in cleverness, that much the cleverest of those 
who oppose the opinions of the lean Mr. Shaw is 
the fat Mr. Chesterton. 

Mr. Chesterton, was sent into the world by an 
[92] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

All- Just God for the exclusive purpose of saying 
the opposite to Mr. Shaw. With the most com- 
plimentary intention I say that Mr. Chesterton's job 
in the world is, when Mr. Shaw speaks, to reply, 
"On the contrary! . . ." He has to restore the 
balance which Mr. Shaw very vigorously disturbs. 
Mr. Chesterton is considerably younger than Mr. 
Shaw, much younger than most people, on seeing 
him, imagine him to be. He was born in London 
in 1874. His book on Browning was published 
when he was twenty-nine, and "The Napoleon of 
Notting Hill" when he was thirty. The bulk of his 
work, and certainly the best of it, with the excep- 
tion of the "Short History of England," was pub- 
lished before he was forty. The bulk, and certainly 
the best, of Mr. Shaw's work was published after he 
had passed his fortieth year. A critic comparing 
the two writers ought to remember that Mr. Shaw's 
work is mainly that of a mature man, whereas 
that of Mr. Chesterton is mainly the work of a 
young man. 



[93] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 



II 



Gilbert Keith Chesterton is commonly known as 
a writer of paradox. He is something of a para- 
dox himself, for he is half-Scotch, half-French, 
and wholly English. This paradox is not any 
more startling than the fact that yellow and blue, 
when mixed together, become green. England is 
half-way between Scotland and France! He 
handles paradox very skilfully, but there are times 
when he imagines he is making a paradox and is 
only making a pun ; and there are other times when 
he is merely making nonsense. He states in a 
book called "What's Wrong With the World" that 
"the prime truth of woman, the universal mother" 
is "that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing 
badly." That is singular paradox! I can under- 
stand a prime truth which declares that a thing is 
worth doing, even if it be done badly, but I can- 
not understand a prime truth which seems to make 
a merit of bad workmanship. 

Elsewhere in the same book, he says that "sub- 
mission to a weak man is discipline. Submission 
to a strong man is servility." The proper com- 
mentary on that paradox can only be made by a 

[94] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

soldier. I can assure Mr. Chesterton that the dis- 
cipline of a weak man is the nearest approach to 
tyranny I know, and it flies to pieces in times of 
great distress. Your strong man can hold 
thoroughly frightened men to their manhood with 
a word and a wave of the hand, but your weak 
man demoralizes them with the fretful tyranny 
which he calls strength. The submission of strong 
men to a weak man may be called discipline, but 
it would be better named self-assurance. But in 
the field itself, when authority and strength are 
needed, that weak man is quietly pushed into the 
background, and the really strong man, although 
he may be a private soldier, takes command. 
One can, of course, pick holes in many of Mr. 
Chesterton's paradoxes in that manner, but it is 
profitless to do so. Our work now is to discover 
what is of value in his doctrine and to describe 
what is unsound in it. 

Roughly, one may say that Mr. Chesterton 
stands for the common man against the very clever 
man. He believes more in the People than he 
believes in Particular Persons. As he himself 
would say, he trusts Man more than he trusts any 
man, a statement which reads better than it sounds. 

[95] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

He believes in tradition, even in legend, which is 
the wisdom accumulated by Man, not out of his 
mind so much as out of his experience. He be- 
lieves in the institution of private property, pro- 
vided that the property is widely distributed. In 
other words, he believes in what is called Peasant 
Proprietorship. He does not believe in Progress 
as Mr. Wells, for example, believes in it, and he 
will tell you very emphatically that the common 
man was happier in the Middle Ages than he is 
to-day. There are times when it seems to me that 
Mr. Chesterton's "common man" is as mythical as 
the "average man" of the newspapers and the 
"economic man" of the economists; and I am 
very dubious about the happiness of the poor 
people of the Middle Ages. It would be foolish to 
carry one's doctrine too far, but if there is any- 
thing in this theory of Man deriving wisdom from 
experience, surely it is reasonable to suppose that 
human beings, having discovered a means of living 
which ensures some comfort and security to them, 
will not easily be deprived of it. Mr. Chesterton 
asks us to believe that the "common" man per- 
mitted the rich lord to rob him of his rights almost 

[96] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

in ignorance of the fact that he was being robbed 
of them. It is just as probable that he was ignor- 
ant of them because he never had them. 

Mr. Chesterton believes, too, in what he calls 
"the ancient and universal things" as against what 
he calls "the modern and specialist things." He 
has invented a theory which establishes man as the 
great specialist and woman as the great amateur, 
and he would keep woman out of the polling-booth, 
not because the vote is too good for her, but because 
it is not good enough. He demands that the woman 
shall stay in the home, not for the Teutonic reason 
that she is inferior to man and must work in a 
narrow area, but for the Chestertonic reason that 
she is capable of more varied work than man and 
can only find adequate range for her variety in the 
broad dominions of the home. "Women were not 
kept at home," he says, "in order to keep them 
narrow; on the contrary, they were kept home in 
order to keep them broad." The effort must seem 
to many persons to have been a singularly unsuc- 
cessful one, but Mr. Chesterton will have none of 
this sophistry. "I do not even pause to deny that 
woman was a servant ; but at least she was a general 

[97] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

servant," he asserts; discovering in her "general- 
ness" a virtue where others would discover only a 
certainty of incompetence and muddle. 

If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit 
the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge 
at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at 
Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more 
heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import 
to the soul, then, as I say, I give it up ; I do not know 
what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a 
definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holi- 
days; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing 
toys, boots, sheets, cakes and books; to be Aristotle 
within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology 
and hygiene — I can understand how this might exhaust 
the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. 
How can it be a large career to tell other people's chil- 
dren about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell 
one's own children about the universe? How can it be 
broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to 
be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is 
laborous, but because it is gigantic, not because it is 
minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her 
task; I v/ill never pity her for its smallness. 



I have quoted that extensive passage because it is 
a good example of Mr. Chesterton's style and his 
thought. It is a mixture of soundness and unsound- 

[98] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

ness, in which the two things merge so impercepti- 
bly that there is difficulty in distinguishing the one 
from the other. It is not easy to see why the sten- 
ographer, travelling to an office every morning at 
the same hour by the same underground railway, 
and typing more or less the sam.e sort of letter 
for a specified number of hours before she returns 
every evening by the same underground railv»^ay to 
the home from which she set out in the morning, 
should be more broad-minded that the woman who 
stays at home performing a variety of jobs; and 
perhaps Mr. Chesterton is justified in his faith by 
the fact that the stenographer is most eager to es- 
cape from the office to the home by the way of 
marriage. 

Nevertheless, I suspect that the home is not quite 
the broadening influence Mr. Chesterton declares it 
to be, and Mr. Chesterton himself provides me with 
the ground for my suspicion. To be Queen Eliz- 
abeth v*^ithin a certain area may be enlarging for 
the mind. To be Whiteley (or Marshal Field, in 
America) v/ithin a certain area may be enlarging 
for the mind. To be Aristotle within a certain 
area may be enlarging for the mind. But to be 
Queen Elizabeth and Whiteley and Aristotle within 

[99] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

a certain area is paralyzing for the mind. The 
stenographer who does one thing every day, has 
time to think of many things: the wife and mother 
who does many things every day has time to think 
of nothing. I do not believe that the stenographer, 
who accepts the responsibilities of marriage and 
motherhood, regards the drudgery of them as an 
unparalleled opportunity for exhibiting her versa- 
tility; and I have observed that the people who are 
most keen on such "modern and specialist things" 
as labour-saving devices, are just those women who, 
in Mr. Chesterton's judgment, should be most re- 
luctant to accept them. 



Ill 



His praise of the "ancient and universal things" 
at the expense of the "modern and specialist 
things" leads him to say that 

If a man found a coil of rope in a desert he could at 
least think of all the things that can be done with a coil 
of rope; and some of them might be practical. He 
could tow a boat or lasso a horse. He could play cat's 
cradle or pick oakum. He could construct a rope-ladder 
for an eloping heiress, or cord her boxes for a travelling 
[100] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

maiden aunt. He could learn to tie a bow, or he could 
hang himself. Far otherwise with the unfortunate 
traveller who should find a telephone in the desert. You 
can telephone with a telephone: you cannot do anything 
else with it. 

He disparages the hot-water pipe in order to ex- 
alt the open fire. He argues that "the ancient and 
universal things" can be turned to many uses, but 
that the "modern and specialist things" are strictly 
limited to one purpose. 

There may be much in his argument, though 
his examples hardly support him, but how much is 
not apparent. Take the case of the man in the 
desert who finds a coil of rope, and compare him 
with the man in the desert who finds a telephone. 
Mr. Chesterton begs us to observe how happy is 
the former compared with the latter, but is he one- 
half so happy? The absorbing passion of a man's 
life in a desert would be the desire to get out of 
the desert as quickly as possible. How far would 
a rope help him to realize his desire? He could 
not tow a boat or lasso a horse because there would 
not be any water on which to tow the boat or any 
horse to lasso. If there were a horse to lasso it 
would either be wild and unrideable or private 
[101] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

property. He could play at cat's cradle with the 
rope if it were not a rope at all — if, that is 
to say it were twine; and perhaps this would 
help him to pass away the time before he died 
of starvation. He could pick oakum if he wished 
to un-rope the rope and had never been to 
prison to discover what a loathsome job oakum- 
picking is. But he could not construct a rope- 
ladder for an eloping heiress or cord her boxes 
for his travelling maiden aunt, because the eloping 
heiress would not be eloping in a desert, and his 
maiden aunt would hardly be packing her trunk 
in the Sahara. He might be able to tie a bow. 
He might even be able to hang himself, though that 
is doubtful, for trees are not prolific in deserts. 
But I cannot see what comfort he would derive 
from either of these accomplishments. 

To sum up, a man in a desert with nothing but 
a coil of rope between him and civilization would 
be in as complete a state of isolation as it would 
be possible for a man to imagine. How different 
would be the case of the man in a desert with the 
despised "modern and specialist" telephone! 
For he, finding a telephone, would instantly be 
able to communicate with other people and to 
[102] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

direct them to his rescue. If he were anxious to 
hang himself, he could more effectively do so in 
the neighbourhood of a telephone than in the neigh- 
bourhood of a coil of rope, for where there are 
telephones there are generally telegraph-poles! 

Even in the case of the open fire and hot-water 
pipe, as much can be said for the "modem and 
specialist thing" as can be said for the "ancient 
and universal thing," and in some instances, more 
can be said for it. We get a cheerful glow from 
an open fire that certainly is not to be got from a 
hot-water pipe; but Mr. Chesterton must have no- 
ticed on many occasions that whereas one gets 
tolerably toasted on one side by an open fire, the 
other side is usually left cold. Thus a man, on 
a wintry night, sitting before the fire, may be too 
warm in front, and half-frozen behind. But a 
hot-water pipe creates an equable temperature in a 
room and leaves a man warm on all sides. 



IV 

He is a nationalist and therefore opposed to 
imperialism. His belief in peasant proprietor- 
ship flows naturally from his belief in national- 
[103] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

ism. He defends peasant proprietorship in "Irish 
Impressions" because he believes that a country 
controlled by peasants will survive long after more 
majestically-governed nations have declined and 
fallen: — 

I do not know how far modern Europe really shows a 
menace of Bolshevism, or how far merely a panic of 
Capitalism. But I know that if any honest resistance 
has to be offered to mere robbery, the resistance of Ire- 
land will be the most honest and probably the most im- 
portant. ... It is where property is well distributed 
that it will be well defended. The post of honour will 
be with those who fight in very truth for their own land. 

Now, here we are on very debateable ground, as 
debateable as his statement that "honour is a lux- 
ury for aristocrats, but it is a necessity for hall-por- 
ters," which is surely an obscure rendering of the 
entirely commercial statement that "honesty is the 
best policy." Honour is not honour when a man 
uses it merely because it is profitable to him, and I 
cannot see much virtue in him who fights for his 
land simply because he owns it. Honour is admir- 
able when it brings not profit but loss to the man 
who wears it. Virtue is in the man who fights for 
his country though he does not own an inch of it. 
[104] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

And here I come to my objection to Mr. Chester- 
ton's beloved peasant proprietorship, the cause of 
my dismay at the thought that my own country of 
Ireland may soon be controlled by small farmers. 
It is true that a peasant will fight desperately 
for his own piece of land, but he manifests a 
sturdy reluctance to fight for another man's land; 
and I cannot understand why Mr. Chesterton re- 
gards his determination to hold on to his property 
as more "honest," or more "honourable" than the 
determination of a Victory bondholder to get the 
last cent of interest out of the taxpayers. Peas- 
ants, no less than other men, in fact more than 
other men, have itching palms, and it is sheer senti- 
mentalism to describe as "honest" or "honourable" 
behaviour in them which is denounced as dishonest 
and dishonourable in a stockbroker. It is true that 
Lenin's schemes collapsed completely before the 
resistance of the Russian peasants, and that his 
plans for the nationization of everything failed to 
include the principal thing of all, namely, the land ; 
but Mr. Chesterton will hardly maintain that the 
Russian peasants had disinterested motives in 
offering this resistance to Lenin. He may, in- 
deed, insist that their motives were entirely inter- 
[105] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

ested and base his case for the Distributive State, 
as Mr. Belloc named it, on that very interest. But 
a nation should be something more than a crowd 
of peasants digging in the earth for their personal 
profit, and when Mr. Chesterton commends his 
peasant proprietors to me, I ask not for the signs 
of their interested behaviour, but for the signs of 
their disinterested behaviour. When he tells me 
that the peasant will fight for his own land, I ask 
him whether the peasant will fight for his neigh- 
bour's land? When he tells me that the Irish 
peasant will resist the attempts of the Bolshevist 
to communalize his land, I ask him whether the 
Irish peasant is equally ready to defend the French 
peasant from Russian aggression? Mr. Chester- 
ton declares that France had claims on the gati- 
tude of Ireland. Did the Irish peasant farmer 
remember those claims on his gratitude? Or did 
he find it more convenient and profitable to ejac- 
ulate, "Yah, dirty atheist, go and fight your own 
battles!" In deriding the idea of empire, Mr. 
Chesterton says in this book of "Irish Impressions" 
that "the British combination" is "more lax and 
liable to schism" than a combination of peasants. 
I do not believe there is any truth in this state- 
[106] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

ment, particularly when I remember that "the Brit- 
ish combination" held together for five years in 
circumstances that might have been expected to 
shake it to pieces. Let me give you an example, 
out of my experience during the War, of the way 
in which the Imperial idea rallies men to its sup- 
port to their own loss. While I was being trained 
to be an officer, I shared a hut with twenty-five 
other men. Between us, we represented every part 
of the British Empire. The twenty-six men in that 
hut included Englishmen, Scotsmen, Welshmen and 
two Irishmen (one of whom was an Orangeman, 
and the other, myself, a Home Ruler). In ad- 
dition to these, there were tv/o Australians, a man 
from New Zealand, tv/o men from Canada, two 
from South Africa and a couple of men from 
South America, one a Spaniard and the other the 
son of English parents. Many of these men had 
travelled for thousands of miles at their own ex- 
pense in order to join the British Army. They 
were volunteers. I would like to see the com- 
munity of peasants that would travel ten yards 
to defend anything but their own personal prop- 
erty, except under compulsion. 

When I cited this case to Mr. Chesterton some 
[107] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

time ago, in controversy with him, he replied with 
characteristic amiability that Serbia was a com- 
munity of peasants, and that Serbia had fought in 
the War. When I asked whether Serbia would 
have fought for Montenegro, he replied that she 
had done more than that, she had fought for "the 
wholly invisible bond of all Christendom." But 
Serbia did nothing of the sort. She fought for 
herself because she was invaded. That was a per- 
fectly proper thing to do, but there is no compar- 
ison between it and the behaviour of men respond- 
ing at their own cost to the Imperial idea, although 
many hundreds of miles away from the place of 
argument and under no compulsion to go to it. 

The truth about a peasant civilization is that it 
is a mean civilization, in which mean virtues com- 
pete with mean vices, and the small and local thing 
is esteemed above the big and worldwide thing. 
There are many defects in empires, even in one so 
loosely-bound as the British Empire, but although 
those who control an empire are often guilty of 
cruel deeds, there is at least this to be said in their 
defense, that they honestly believe themselves to be 
possessed of greater wisdom than those whom they 
[108] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

oppress, and do desire in their stupid fashion to 
govern tliem for their good. 

On the whole, freedom may be defined as the 
right to choose; but that definition must obviously 
be subject to limitations. There is a sort of wild 
and woolly democrat who believes in the right of 
uninstructed persons to choose wrong. It is not 
a right in which I believe. Mr. Chesterton thinks, 
not without justification, that the common man can 
choose in a right manner. If his creed were con- 
fined to that clause we could accept it with heart- 
iness, but there are times when he seems to think 
that the common man chooses aright because he is 
a common man, and he leaves us with the impres- 
sion that he can never quite forgive Magna Charta 
because it was won by peers, and not by peasants. 
He seems not to realize that if Magna Charta had 
depended upon peasants, it would never have been 
won. 



But he helps us to keep a balance. His service 
to us is that when we are inclined to run frantically 
[109] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

after the superman, he reminds us of the existence 
of the common man. If he were not so well- 
padded with flesh, I should describe him as the 
skeleton at a feast of supermen, reminding them 
that even a superman can be a fool. 

There are times indeed, when his faith in the 
common man undergoes a sea-change, and he ut- 
ters sentiments that might be spoken by Mr. H. 
L. Mencken, who camiot abide the common mind. 
In one of his essays, Mr. Chesterton says, "I cer- 
tainly would much rather share my apartments with 
a gentleman who though he was God than with a 
gentleman who thought he was a grasshopper." 
So would Nietzsche. But I doubt whether the 
Early Christians would have approved his prefer- 
ence. They, who were ready to pronounce all 
flesh to be grass, would not have found anything in- 
compatible with their faith in a gentleman 
who regarded himself as a grasshopper. They 
would certainly have considered his rival in mis- 
apprehension to be a blasphemer. And if Mr. 
Chesterton would fail to find pleasure in the com- 
pany of a man who believed himself to be that in- 
teresting but monotonous insect, how much less 
pleasure would he derive from sharing his apart- 
[110] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

ments with a man who believed not only himself, 
but all men, to be worms? 

He is personally the most kindly and agreeable 
of men, in whom the one virtue commonly as- 
cribed to fat men, that of good nature, is most 
highly developed. His anger is almost completely 
impersonal. His pardon is on the heels of his 
condemnation. The sins of jealously and hatred 
are unknown to him, and he seems to be without 
the power of resenting spiteful things done to him- 
self. He said to me on one occasion, "Arnold Ben- 
nett says I'm an imbecile!" in the tone of a man 
who was not in the least annoyed by the statement, 
but puzzled by the fact that any man should call 
another one an offensive name. We are all chil- 
dren of the one God, in his belief, even if some 
of us are Jews, and in some mystical manner he 
contrives, in his anger, to discriminate between the 
human being and the thing which the human being 
does. If ever he is moved to slay a sweater or 
an international financier or a Prohibitionist, he 
will do so entirely without prejudice to that per- 
son's right to be called a child of God. It is a 
tribute to the charm of his character and the equ- 
ability of his temper that his stoutest admirers are 

[111] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

those who most vigorously combat his opinions, 
and that most of his friends are men who do not 
share any of his views, except perhaps the only 
view that matters, the view that an ill deed must be 
exposed and a wrong put right. He is Don Quix- 
ote in the body of Sancho Panza. 



[112] 



JOHN GALSWORTHY 



It is sometimes said that an artist never intrudes 
his personality into his work and that the great 
writers of the world have kept themselves so closely 
to themselves that their readers have never been 
able to discover anything of their faith or partial- 
ities. This is not only untrue, but is also absurd, 
for how can any man hope to exclude himself from 
his creations, since without him the creations would 
not be? There never was a book of any sort which 
did not in some fashion reveal the nature of its 
author to discerning readers, and I will personally 
undertake to give a fairly accurate account of the 
general character of any author after an attentive 
reading of all his writings. There are authors, 
such as Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. H. G. Wells, 
who do not make any pretence of excluding them- 
selves from the notice of their readers: they de- 
liberately force themselves into their books; and 
the habit has become so much a part of 
[113] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

their nature that they sometimes do it uncon- 
sciously. One may say of them, perhaps, that 
we learn chiefly from their writings what their 
opinions are, but learn nothing of their 
characters. But while it is true that we do 
receive much information about their opinions, it 
is true also, I think, that they unmistakably reveal 
themselves, something of the intimate parts of 
them, to those who closely consider their books. 
Fielding formally held up the course of his stories 
in order that he might state his views to his readers, 
and Dickens and Thackeray followed his example; 
but all three of them revealed more than their be- 
liefs to their readers — they revealed them- 
selves. Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells are excellent 
examples of what may be described as the Direct 
Revealers — writers who nakedly manifest their 
opinions and, more or less nakedly, their personal- 
ities in their books. The Indirect Revealers are 
best exemplified in two poets, Shakespeare and 
John Millington Synge, and one novelist and dram- 
atist, Mr. John Galsworthy. We have very little 
documentary evidence of Shakespeare's existence, 
and it is impossible, therefore, to write his biog- 
raphy with the accuracy of detail with which one 
[114] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

is able to record the events of, say, Roosevelt's 
career; but there is a clear and unmistakable ac- 
count of his hopes and fears and beliefs and dis- 
beliefs, a most faithful portrait of his character, 
contained in his poems and pla3^s. How can any 
one fail to discover behind his work the figure of 
a grave, fastidious, disdainful and distrustful and 
solitary man whose spiritual solitude was con- 
cealed under an appearance of gregariousness and 
cheerful living that made him a good companion 
on most occasions without being excessively pop- 
ular. Ben Jonson, despite his quarrelsome char- 
acter, was probably more deeply loved by his con- 
temporaries than Shakespeare was, because Shake- 
speare had more of reserve and spiritual isolation 
than Ben had, and was less willing to put faith in 
the virtue of the crowd ; and I imagine that had one 
interrogated any of Shakespeare's friends, they 
would have said of him, "Oh, yes, I like William 
Shakespeare very much! Talks well! He's a 
good chap, but a little odd . . . queer ... at 
times. It isn't easy to make friends v/ith him. 
He always keeps us at our distance — not deliber- 
ately, of course, but in some vague way. He un- 
derstands us all right, and he takes part in our 
[115] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

revels, but he never completely descends to our 
level. Now, old Ben . . . he's a good, hearty- 
chap! He is so comradely that we frequently for- 
get he is Ben Jonson and think of him as just one 
of ourselves. Shakespeare's friendly enough, but 
we never forget that he is Shakespeare. Some- 
times, quite unintentionally, he makes us feel a 
little common! . . ." 

The best biography of John Synge that I have 
read — and I have read all of them — is contained 
in his plays and poems. It is impossible to rise 
from his books without an impression of intense 
loneliness and unachievable desires, of a man 
eager to be the hero of romantic exploits, but 
totally unable to stand up to life and make him- 
self a hero because of some spiritual ineffective- 
ness, some lack of assertion which results in fum- 
bling and self -distrust; and one goes from the plays 
and poems to the biographies and is not surprised 
at reading of his lonely life. How often the word 
"lonesome" occurs in his writings, and how deeply 
he insists on the terrors of solitude! Pegeen Mike 
in the "The Playboy of the Western World" re- 
proves her father for going "over the sands to 
Kate Cassidy's wake" and leaving her alone in the 
shebeen: 

[116] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

If I am a queer daughter, it's a queer father'd be 
leaving me lonesome these twelve hours of dark, and 
I piling the turf with the dogs barking, and the calves 
mooing, and my own teeth rattling with the fear. 

I imagine tliat there is some deep personal feel- 
ing of Synge's in the speech he puts into the mouth 
of Christy Mahon in the second act of the same 
play: 

Christy: And isn't it a poor thing to be starting 
again, and I a lonesome fellow will be looking out on 
women and girls the way the needy fallen spirits do be 
looking for the Lord? 

Pegeen: What call have you to be lonesome when 
there's poor girls walking Mayo in their thousands now? 

Christy: It's well you know what call I have. It's 
well you know it's a lonesome thing to be passing small 
towns with the lights shining sideways when the night 
is down, or going in strange places with a dog noising 
before you and a dog noising behind, or drawn to the 
cities where you'd hear a voice kissing and talking deep 
love in every shadow of the ditch, and you passing on 
with an empty, hungry stomach failing from your 
heart. 

[117] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

Pegeen: I'm thinking you're an odd man, Christy 
Mahon. The oddest walking fellow I ever set my eyes 
on to this hour to-day. 

Christy: What would any be but odd men and they 
living lonesome in the world? 

The scene of all his plays is laid in a lonely 
place: the last cottage at the head of a long glen 
in Wicklow; a small and remote island off the 
west coast of Ireland; a distant hamlet in a moun- 
tainous district. His people are possessed of a 
perpetual fear of death and old age, and lead un- 
eventful lives, having minds which continually 
crave for the performance of splendid and un- 
usual deeds. Fev/ men have put their longings 
and disappointments so boldly and plainly into 
their work as John Synge put his. I do not sug- 
gest that an author may be identified with every 
word and action of his creatures — a manifestly 
absurd suggestion — but I do suggest that it is pos- 
sible for an intelligent reader to obtain a very 
clear and well-defined impression of the character 
and beliefs of an author from a careful study of 
the whole body of his work. 
[118] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

II 

Mr. John Galsworthy is the most sensitive figure 
in the ranks of modern men of letters, but his 
sensitiveness is of a peculiar nature, for it is almost 
totally impersonal. One thinks of Dostoievsky 
eternally pitying himself in the belief that he was 
pitying humanity and particularly that part of it 
which is Russian; or of Maxim Gorki, as shown in 
his vivid and extraordinary study of Leo Tolstoi,* 
preoccupied with himself to the extent of imagin- 
ing that Tolstoi, the aristocrat, related salacious 
stories in common speech to him, the peasant, be- 
cause he imagined that Gorki, being of vulgar or- 
igin, could not appreciate refined conversation: 

I remember my first meeting with him and his talk 
about "Varienka Oliessova" and "Twenty-six and One." 
From the ordinary point of view, what he said was a 
string of indecent words. I was perplexed by it and 
even offended. I thought that he considered me incapa- 
ble of understanding any other kind of language. I 
understand now: it was silly to have felt offended. 

One thinks, too, of Mr. Shaw's lively interest 
in himself, and of Mr. Wells's eagerness to remold 

* Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi, by Maxim Gorki. 

[119] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

the world nearer to his heart's desire. And re- 
membering these men, intensely individual and 
not reluctant to speak of themselves, one is startled 
to discover how destitute of egotism Mr. Gals- 
worthy seems to be. It may even be argued that 
his lack of interest in himself is a sign of inade- 
quate artistry, that it is impossible for a man of 
supreme quality to be so utterly unconcerned about 
himself as Mr. Galsworthy is. He has written 
more than a dozen novels and at least a dozen 
plays, but there is not one line in any of them to 
denote that he takes any interest whatever in John 
Galsworthy. The most obvious characteristic of 
his work is an immense and, sometimes, indis- 
criminating pity, but I imagine that the only crea- 
ture on whom he has no pity is himself. What- 
ever of joy and grief he has had in life has been 
closely retained, and the reticence which was char- 
acteristic of the English people — I am now using 
the word "English" in the strict sense — in pre- 
war times, but is hardly characteristic of them 
now, is most clearly to be observed in Mr. Gals- 
worthy. And yet there are few among contem- 
porary writers who reveal so much of themselves 
as he does. Neither Mr. Shaw nor Mr. Wells, 
[120] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

who constantly expose their beliefs to their readers, 
do in the long run tell so much about their charac- 
ters as Mr. Galsworthy, who never makes a con- 
scious revelation of himself and is probably quite 
unaware that he had made any revelations at all. 
How often have we observed in our own relation- 
ships that some garrulous person, constantly en- 
gaged in egotistical conversation, contrives to con- 
ceal knowledge of himself from us, while some 
silent friend, with lips tightly closed, most amaz- 
ingly gives himself away. One looks at Mr. Gals- 
worthy's handsome, sensitive face and is immedi- 
ately aware of tightened lips! . . . But the lips 
are not tightened because of things done to him, 
but because of things done to others. 

I remember, more than ten years ago, reading 
a notice of the first performance of "Justice" in 
an English Sunday newspaper in which the critic, 
who must have been terribly drunk when he wrote 
it, attacked the play, making nine misstatements of 
fact about it in as many lines. Those were the 
days when I took the field on the slightest provoca- 
tion. An insult offered to a man of letters for 
whom I had respect was an insult offered to me, 
and I made much trouble for myself by smacking 
[121] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

faces with great ferocity for offences, not against 
me, but against my friends and my betters. I 
wrote a letter to that critic which created some 
havoc in his sodden brain, and I then posted a 
copy of it to Mr. Galsworthy. He thanked me 
very civilly for what I had done, and added that 
he never replied to criticism of any sort! I was 
astounded by his statement and a little dashed. 
My faith in those days was, crudely, two eyes for 
one tooth! Those who struck at me might expect 
two blows in return. Like Mrs. Ferguson, in my 
play, "John Ferguson," I said to myself, "If any- 
one was to hurt me, I'd do my best to hurt them 
back and hurt them harder nor they hurt me!" 
I could not bring myself into line with the meek- 
ness of Mr. Galsworthy until I discovered in it a 
form of supreme arrogance! . . . Now that I 
know him and his work better, I realize that I was 
wrong in my estimation of him both as excessively 
meek and excessively arrogant. His rule never 
to reply to criticism, however unfair, is a sign, not 
of humility or pride, but of complete indifference 
to himself. I can believe in him becoming fu- 
rious with one who belittles a dog, but I cannot be- 
[122] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

lieve in him displaying any feeling over one who 
belittles John Galsworthy. 

But when I look at his tightened lips, I feel 
certain that they are drawn closely together, not 
to prevent himself from forgetting his indifference 
to himself, but to prevent him from pouring out 
his anger at wrong and cruelty suffered by other 
people. His hatred of injustice possesses him like 
a fury, so that I expect to find his hands always 
clenched. There are times, indeed, when he al- 
lows his feeling for others, human and animal, 
to destroy his sense of proportion, and he will 
sometimes imagine that people or beasts are suf- 
fering a great deal more of pain than they really 
are, even that they are suffering when in fact they 
are not suffering at all. This is the complaint most 
commonly made of him by his critics, that he some- 
times exaggerates the extent to which people and, 
particularly, animals suffer. When I was a child, 
I remember that I often read in sentimental Sun- 
day-school books of slum children who never 
smiled and had never seen grass. I suppose 
that fundamentally I have a sceptical mind, for 
even then I found myself doubting whether there 
[123] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

were any children in the world who had never 
seen grass. Grass is so persistent! ... I knew 
that a street had only to be free of traffic for a 
short while and little blades of grass would begin 
to push up from between the cobbles! ... It 
might be that slum children never smiled — though 
I was dubious of that — ^but all of them must have 
seen some grass sometime. Then I grew up and 
left Ulster and went to England, and for two or 
three years I lived on the confines of a slum in 
South London, where I discovered that my senti- 
mental authors were sentimental liars, that poor 
people do not live lives of incessant misery, that 
they smile and laugh as often as, if not more fre- 
quently than, rich people, and are fully as happy 
as any one else. Happiness and unhappiness are 
conditions of the spirit, and provided a man has 
sufficient food to eat and a decent shelter and warm 
clothes, it matters very little whether he be rich 
or poor. Mr. Galsworthy is not always as sensi- 
ble of this as he might be. Like many idealists 
he attaches more importance to material things than 
many materialists do. He lets himself be too 
easily persuaded that a thing is wrong because it 
looks wrong. If he had walked into the Valley of 
[124] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

Elah on that morning when the fair and ruddy 
youth, David, encountered Goliath, he v/ould cer^ 
tainly have run to David's side. What combat 
could have seemed more unequal than that? 
David was young and slender and of ordinary stat- 
ure. He wore no armor and his weapons were a 
sling and five pebbles casually picked from a brook 
Goliath was five cubits and a span high, and his 
huge body was covered with heavy armor. There 
was a helmet of brass on his head, and there were 
greaves of brass on his legs, and a target of brass 
between his shoulders. His weapons were ter- 
rible: the staff of his spear was like a weaver's 
beam, and his spear's head weighed six hundred 
shekels of iron. A man walked in front of him 
carrying a shield! ... No wonder that Goliath 
mocked at David and threatened to pick the flesh 
from his bones and give it to the birds. He prob- 
ably felt that one breath from his mouth would 
blow David clean out of the valley. Mr. Gals- 
worthy, had he been present on that occasion, 
would have said to himself, "Poor David, young 
and slight and ill-armed, has no chance whatever 
against this great hulking, uncircumcized Philis- 
tine! . . ." The combat certainly was an un- 
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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

equal one, but the advantage lay, not with Goliath, 
but with David. The giant had the outward show 
of strength, but David had the Power of God in his 
right arm, and before that Power Goliath was but 
a boneless beast. Mr. Galsworthy makes Stephen 
More in his play "The Mob," revile the crowd in 
these terms: 

You are the thing that pelts the weak; kicks women; 
howls down free speech. This to-day, and that to-mor- 
row. Brain — you have none! Spirit — not the ghost of 
it! If you're not meanness, there's no such thing. If 
you're not cowardice, there is no cowardice. 

Neither Stephen More nor Mr. Galsworthy ap- 
pears to know that these characteristics of the mob 
are the characteristics of weak things. Strong men 
do not pelt the weak or kick women, nor do they 
prevent free speech. It is weak men and timid 
men and ignorant, frightened men — politicians and 
officials and guttersnipes and sinners — who do 
these things, because they have neither the courage 
nor the strength nor the intelligence to do other- 
wise. The mob-instinct of unreasoning chivalry, 
the natural impulse to take the part of "the little 
'un," constitutes a very serious danger to Mr. Gals- 
[126] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

worthy's work: he is becoming increasingly par- 
tisan in his opinions and sympathies, with the result 
that his sentiment is in danger of degenerating into 
sentimentalism, and he, so commonly considered 
impartial, is likely to end in a state of hopeless and 
wrong-headed bias. He is beginning to believe 
that a weak man is right because he is weak. He 
is forgetting the truth enunciated, perhaps exces- 
sively, by Dr. Stockmann in "An Enemy of the 
People" that "the strongest man in the world is the 
man who stands absolutely alone." Or if he has 
not forgotten it, he is in danger of believing that 
a minority is always in the right because it is a 
minority: a belief which is as fallacious as that 
which Mr. G. K. Chesterton sometimes seems to 
hold, that a majority is always in the right because 
it is a majority. The plain and platitudinous 
truth is that only those are in the right who are in 
the right, whether they be in a majority or in a 
minority. Weakness, although it may endow a 
man with cunning, does not endow him with moral 
authority. Mr. Galsworthy at times lets his pity 
for weakness lead him into seeming to regard it as 
a sign of infallible judgment. 
[127] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 
III 

Mr. Galsworthy can create people and he can 
write natural dialogue. "The Silver Box" is a 
testimony of his power to do so. But in his later 
plays he has not always allowed his creatures to be- 
have in a creditable fashion, nor has he always 
written dialogue that exactly fits their tongues. 
One suspects, too, that he is losing his sense of 
proportion, that he is not so capable now as he was 
earlier in his career of distinguishing between 
things which are important and things which 
are not. He has developed an interest in trivial 
questions of sex and has become so absorbed in 
dilemmas of colliding characters that he has lost 
sight of the nature of his characters. He has been 
called a Determinist because he shows his people 
as the creature of circumstances, but in his later 
work, particularly in his play "The Fugitive," his 
Determinism has become wilful: he seems to have 
made up his mind that his characters shall be- 
come the victims of circumstances in defiance of 
facts and the natures with which he has created 
them. He deliberately ties their hands behind 
their backs and then exclaims: "These are the vie- 
[128] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

tims of adverse circumstances!" And indeed they 
are, but the circumstances have been artifically 
created by Mr. Galsworthy and not by any force 
that governs the universe. He is so eager to bring 
Clare Dedmond, in "The Fugitive," to her death in 
a restaurant frequented by prostitutes that he to- 
tally neglects to consider the fact that with the na- 
ture he gives her she is the last person on earth 
likely to end that way. 

It is not in ideas that Mr. Galsworthy fails, so 
far as his later work is concerned — it is in exe- 
cution. The idea of "The Fugitive" is a notable 
one. The play, which in its faults is significant of 
all Mr. Galsworthy's later plays, deals with the 
tragic failure of a sensitive woman to adjust her 
life to that of a dull, unimaginative man in whom, 
although the conventions and traditions of his class 
have schooled him into a certain decency of form, 
there is a very large measure of coarseness. The 
collision is between the finely-perceptive and the 
totally-imperceptive, and the theme is similar, in 
one respect, to that of "The Doll's House," and in 
another to that of "The Shadow of the Glen." But 
the treatment of it is very inferior to the treatment 
of it by Ibsen and Synge. Ibsen plainly showed 
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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

how impossible it was for Nora to continue to live 
with her husband after she had suffered her disil- 
lusionment. He showed with equal clarity how 
natural it was that she should marry and love her 
husband, and yet in the end, turn away from him. 
Mr. Galsworthy takes Clare Dedmond beyond the 
stage to which Ibsen took Nora. Ibsen was content 
to end his play with Nora's exit from her husband's 
home: he did not follow her from it nor show what 
became of her thereafter. Mr. Galsworthy is con- 
cerned less with the act of separation and more 
with the consequences if it. He is not so interested 
in her flight from her husband as he is in what 
happens to her after she has flown from him. He 
has taken a longer stretch of Clare's life than 
Ibsen took of Nora's, but he has contrived to make 
it smaller than Nora's. One derives an extraor- 
dinary sense of completeness and space from "The 
Doll's House," but does not derive a similar sense 
from "The Fugitive." Ibsen gives one a sense of 
familiarity with his people, but Mr. Galsworthy 
hardly makes one more familiar with Clare Ded- 
mond and her husband than a reader of a news- 
paper is with the principal parties to a divorce 
suit. 

[130] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

Clare Dedmond, like Nora Burke in Synge's 
"The Shadow of the Glen," is suffering from 
starved emotions, but Synge in his one-act play has 
created the atmosphere of starved emotions far 
more successfully than Mr. Galsworthy has done in 
his four acts. The antagonism between Nora and 
Daniel Burke is instantly understood by the reader, 
who, however, cannot immediately understand why 
it is that Clare and George Dedmond do not "get 
on" together. The reader knows why Nora married 
Daniel. "And how would I live and I an old 
woman if I hadn't a bit of a farm with cows on it 
and sheep on the blackhills?" The sense of deso- 
lation in this woman's life is so powerfully ex- 
pressed that the reader of the play does not ask 
questions. He does not stop to inquire why Nora 
married her husband: he knows why she married 
him, and this knowledge is derived, not from the 
author's assertions, but from the woman's behav- 
iour. A sense of desolation is not created when 
the author says that there is desolation, nor is it 
created when a character says: "I am miserable!" 
It is created when the speech and behaviour of 
the characters are such as one hears and sees when 
people are unhappy. It would be absurd for a 
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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

writer to make a character say: "I have a very 
kindly disposition," and then show him in the 
normal hahit of beating his wife, kicking his grand- 
mother, and ill-treating animals . . . unless he 
were trying to be funny or were portraying a mad- 
man. There must be consistency between char- 
acter and conduct, and the measure of a writer's 
artistry is the degree to which he succeeds in recon- 
ciling the one with the other. 

It is when Mr. Galsworthy's later work is tested 
in this manner that one realizes how lamentably 
he has failed to create the illusion of life. One 
goes through the pages of "The Fugitive" making 
notes of interrogation! One does not ask: "Why 
did Ibsen's Nora marry her husband?" "Why 
did Synge's Nora marry her husband?" because 
one knows the answer to these questions from the 
beginning of the plays, and it is not necessary to 
ask them. But why did Clare Dedmond marry 
her husband? Because she loved him? Because 
she wished to be married and no one else had asked 
her? For money? To escape from her parents? 
It is impossible to say. Most of the faults which 
I find in Mr. Galsworthy's work are to be found in 
[132] 



1 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

this play and so I propose to examine it here in de- 
tail. 

The Story of "The Fugitive" is summarily 
this: — 

Clare Huntington, the daughter of a poor parson, 
is married to George Dedmond, a man of wealth 
and social position. When the play begins these 
two have reached that point in their marital re- 
lationship when their unhappiness is plain to their 
acquaintances. The husband, irritated and puz- 
zled, is eager to make a compromise which will 
not involve legal separation and "talk." 

Clare {softly) . I don't give satisfaction. Please give 
me notice. 

George. Pish ! 

Clare. Five years, and four of them' like this! I'm 
sure we've served our time. Don't you really think we 
might get on better together — if I went away. 

George. Fve told you I won't stand a separation for 
no real reason, and have your name bandied about all 
over London. I have some primitive sense of honour. 

While travelling abroad the Dedmonds make the 

acquaintance of a journalist named Kenneth 

Malise who is employed on a weekly review. He 

and Clare become very friendly with each other, 

[133] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

but George, who declares that Malise is a bounder, 
does not share the friendship. Malise knows that 
Clare is unhappy in her marriage and he incites 
her to "spread your wings." He does not appear 
to have thought of what is to become of her when 
she spreads her wings, nor does he manifest any 
concern about her ability to remain in flight. His 
attitude towards her may roughly be said to be: 
"It doesn't matter what happens to you so long 
as you run away from your husband!" Clare 
eventually leaves her husband, and in the second 
act she goes to Malise's rooms to ask for his ad- 
vice. She has taken his advice to spread her 
wings. What is she to do? 

Mr. Malise very clearly does not know what 
she is to do. While he and she are debating 
about her future his rooms are invaded by Ded- 
mond's parents, his solicitor, and, subsequently, 
by Dedmond himself. They endeavour to per- 
suade Clare to return to her husband, which she 
refuses to do, and there is a scene in which George 
Dedmond, having offered to take Clare back to 
his home, goes away threatening to divorce her 
and cite Malise as co-respondent. After this 
scene Clare, in obedience to her queer sense of 
[134] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

honour, which impels her to make hateful returns 
for favours received, offers herself in physical 
submission to Malise, without, however, being able 
to conceal the fact that such submission is loath- 
some to her. It is necessary, in studying this play, 
to take considerable notice of Clare's attitude 
towards physical relationships. Sexual submis- 
sion is repulsive to her, not only in relation to 
her husband, whom she dislikes, but also in re- 
lation to Malise, for whom she has so much liking 
that eventually she falls in love with him. At the 
moment at which the offer is first made, however, 
she is not in love with Malise: she offers herself 
to him because she feels that, having brought 
trouble upon him, she ought to make reparation 
for her conduct! 

Clare. If I must bring you harm — let me pay you 
back. I can't bear it otherwise! Make some use of me, 
if you don't mind! 
Malise. My God! 

She puts her face up to be kissed, shutting her 
eyes. 

Malise. You poor 

He clasps and kisses her; then, drawing back, 
looks in he? face. She has not moved; her 
eyes are still closed. But she is shivering; 
[135] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

her lips are tightly pressed together, her 
hands twitching. 

Malise {very quietly) , No, no! This is not the house 
of a "gentleman." 

Clare, (letting her head fall, and almost in a 
whisper) . I'm sorry — 

Malise. I understand. 

Clare. I don't feel. And without — I can't, can't. 

Malise (bitterly). Quite right. You've had enough 
of that. 

That speech — "I don't feel. And without — I 
can't, can't" — is the key-speech of Clare Ded- 
mond's nature, and, in view of the end of the play, 
must be remembered. 

Malise, recognizing that Clare cannot happily 
be his mistress otherwise than in name, will not 
accept her offer of physical submission merely as 
a return for what he may have to bear in her be- 
half, and so she leaves his flat. She obtains em- 
ployment as a shop-assistant, and is not seen again, 
by her family or by Malise, for three months. 
Then, after she has encountered a relative, she bolts 
in a panic from the shop and returns to Malise's 
flat. She proposes to do typewriting and asks 
him to find employment for her. He gives her 
some of his own MSS. to type, and while they are 
[136] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

discussing her prospects of employment she re- 
veals the fact that she now loves him. 

Malise. Can you typewrite where you are? 

Clare. I have to find a new room, anyway. I'm 
changing — to be safe. {She takes a luggage ticket from 
her glove). I took my things to Charing Cross — only a 
bag and one trunk. {Then, with that queer expression 
on her face which prefaces her desperations.) You 
don't want me now, I suppose? 

Malise. What? 

Clare, {hardly above a whisper). Because — if you 
still wanted me — I do — now. 

Malise {staring hard into her face that is quivering 
and smiling). You mean it? You do? You care? 

Clare. I've thought of you — so much. But only — 
if you're sure. 

He clasps her, and kisses her closed eyes. 

That love declaration is singularly unconvincing, 
more so to the reader of the play than to the wit- 
ness of it. It is not unlikely that Clare's liking 
for Malise increased during the three months of 
their separation, particularly as she regarded him 
as a benefactor to whom she had brought trouble, 
but it seems to me to be improbable that she would 
declare her love so casually. Mr, Galsworthy's 
stage directions make the puzzle more involved. 
[137] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

If Clare were in love with Malise to the extent of 
overcoming her hatred of physical contacts, she 
would hardly have "that queer expression on her 
face which prefaces her desperations." When 
a man or woman is desperate he or she is hope- 
less or almost hopeless, and if Mr. Galsworthy's 
stage directions are to be taken seriously then 
they mean that Clare was willing to become the 
mistress of Malise for much the same reason that 
a rat will fight in a corner. But if her words mean 
what they would seem to mean, surely, given her 
character and remembering what she has endured, 
her surrender to Malise will not be accompanied 
by any signs of desperation at all, but in sheer 
reaction, if nothing else, by every sign of jubila- 
tion and relief. 

The attitude of Malise towards Clare does not 
appear to have undergone any change at all; he 
is not any more in love with her in the third act 
than he was in the first act, when, indeed, his love 
had a dubious aspect. There is no warmth in the 
man, no glow. He is cold, not with the hard, 
sharp, tingling cold of ice, but with the flabby 
chill of a dead fish. When George Dedmond in- 
stitutes divorce proceedings, citing Malise as co- 
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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

respondent, the fellow goes to pieces, and whines 
and bleats to his charwoman because the pro- 
prietors of the review on which he is employed 
propose to dismiss him. They have some scruples 
against writers who become involved in scandals. 
The charwoman informs Clare of Malise's misery, 
and she, knowing that her husband will abandon 
the suit if she leaves Malise, goes quietly from 
his flat. Her next appearance is in a restaurant, 
largely patronized by prostitutes. One does not 
know what has happened to her in the meantime, 
but it is plain that she must have suffered acutely, 
for this delicately bred woman, sensitive to the 
point of morbidity about sexual relationships, has 
decided to become a prostitute! We see her en- 
tering "The Gascony" for the first time when the 
fourth act begins. A young man, ordinary, 
decent, and uncommonly lustful, makes overtures 
to her, treating her with kindliness when he dis- 
covers that he is her first customer. His kindli- 
ness helps to reconcile her to her position, and 
she prepares to leave the restaurant with him. 
While he is paying the bill two coarse men leer 
at her, and one of them accosts her, making an 
appointment for the following evening. As she 
[139] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

watches his coarse face, inflamed with lust, she 
realises the horror of the life she is about to lead, 
and suddenly makes a decision — she takes a bottle 
of poison from her dress, pours its contents into 
a wine-glass, and drinks it. She dies while some 
sportsmen in an adjoining room play "the last 
notes of an old song 'This Day a Stag Must Die' 
on a horn." And that is the end of the play. 

It seems to me to be incredible that Clare Ded- 
mond should have gone to that restaurant to sell 
herself to any casual purchaser. It seems to me, 
given her nature, incredible that she should even 
have thought of such a way of life or that, having 
thought of it, she should not instantly poison her- 
self rather than endure it. Mr. Galsworthy insists 
throughout the play on her exceptional sensitive- 
ness about sex-relationships. I think that psycho- 
logically he has over-stated this sensitiveness, but, 
assuming that he has not done so, is it conceivable 
that a woman who shivers and twitches her hands 
when she is kissed by a man whom she likes will 
consent to put on fine clothes and go to a notorious 
restaurant and sit at a table while men inspect her? 
. . . (I leave out of consideration such questions 
as: "Where did she obtain the fine clothes?" "How 
[140] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

did she acquire her knowledge of 'The Gas- 
cony'? ") If she were prepared to endure that 
last of all defilements, why did she run away from 
her husband? If she were capable of selling her 
embraces, why did she shiver and twitch when 
Malise kissed her? George Dedmond was not a 
"bad" man. He did not ill-treat her nor was he 
faithless to her. He insisted, indeed, on sexual 
submissions, but one has difficulty in believing 
that her horror of these, "unless I feel," was very 
strong since she was willing to suffer the casual 
amours of "The Gascony." There would have 
been something pitiable in her if, after leaving 
Malise, she had returned to George. There would 
have been something tragical in her if, reluctant 
to return to George, she had killed herself when 
she found that she could not maintain herself in 
decency. But there is nothing either pitiable or 
tragical in the end devised for her by Mr. Gals- 
worthy. It is an arranged and schemed destiny 
that overwhelms Clare Dedmond, arranged and 
schemed not by Circumstance but by Mr. Gals- 
Y/orthy, and having no relation whatever to the 
nature of the woman. Mr. Galsworthy wanted 
to poison her in "The Gascony," and so he thrust 
[141] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

her into the restaurant in plain disregard of her 
character and of common facts. 

There is a phrase in the play which is intended 
to illuminate Clare's nature. "You're too fine," 
Mrs. Fullarton says to her, "and you're not fine 
enough to endure things." How can one be too 
fine to endure a thing and yet not fine enough 
to endure it? And, having begun to question in 
that fashion, one goes on again to wonder why she 
married her husband. "Five years" (of mar- 
riage), she says to her husband, "and four of them 
like this!" Here is no case of slow transformation 
of love into dislike or of instant disillusionment. 
Clare does not suddenly discover or slowly dis- 
cover that George is not the sort of man she had 
imagined him to be, for he remains throughout the 
play exactly the sort of man he was when she v/as 
wooed and married by him. He did not become 
prosaic, unimaginative, and coarse after marriage: 
he was always like that; and Clare, so sensitive 
as she was, must have been jarred by him as much 
before marriage as she was a year after marriage. 
There is no suggestion in the play that she married 
for money. Had she done so, surely she would, 
when we remember the depths to which she was 
[142] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

subsequently prepared to descend, have borne his 
dullness and coarseness, not gladly, perhaps, but 
with fortitude? 

The processes of attraction and repulsion are so 
complicated that it is difficult to say where one 
begins and the other ends, but this difficulty is 
hardly to be experienced in cases where the per- 
sonalities are so marked and divergent as were 
the personalities of Clare and George Dedmond. 
If one were to take a man like Squire Western in 
"Tom Jones" and marry him to Melisande in "Pel- 
leas et Melisande," one could prophesy with some 
certainty what would be the result of such a mar- 
riage. It would be disastrous. Left to the or- 
dinary processes of nature, however, such a mar- 
riage would not take place at all. 

But the difficulty of fathoming Clare's rela- 
tionships does not end with her husband. It is 
equally difficult to understand her attitude towards 
Malise. What attracted her to this extraordi- 
narily ill-bred man who sneers openly at her rela- 
tives and friends, mocking and insulting them to 
her and to their faces? The Dedmonds, parents 
and son, are dense, but they are decent. They live 
by rule because they cannot live by any other 
[143] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

means. It is not their fault that they cannot under- 
stand Clare's point of view, any more than it is 
the fault of a blind man that he falls over an 
obstacle which he cannot see. Malise regards 
them as malignant people, deliberately imprison- 
ing an aspiring woman. His vision of them is as 
narrow as is theirs of him, and, since he has 
not got their breeding or kindliness, his conduct 
is caddish where theirs is merely stupid. There 
is no magnitude or charity in this man. He spends 
his days and nights in writing petulant screeds in 
the style of Thomas Carlyle: windy stuff, blowing 
out of a noisome mind; and when he has induced 
one helpless, incompetent woman to follow his 
creed he fails her completely. 

The last sentences of the play show that Mr. 
Galsworthy had set his mind on Clare's death in 
disregard of the probabilities. Clare, having 
swallowed the poison, is lying back in her chair, 
presumably dead. 

The Young Man has covered his eyes with his hands; 
Arnaud is crossing himself fervently; the Languid 
Lord stands gazing with one of the dropped 
gardenias twisted in his fingers; and the woman 
bending over Clare, kisses her forehead, 
[144] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

That is a piece of theatricality. It has no re- 
lationship to real things. Those people, in life, 
would not have stood about in sentimental attitudes 
watching a woman die of poison. The young 
man would have flown for a doctor; the waiter 
would have rushed off for an emetic; the languid 
lord would have lost his languid airs in his desire 
to get away from the restaurant in fear lest he 
might be summoned as a witness at the inquest; and 
the woman would promptly have had hysterics. 

IV 

He seems to be most impressed, in viewing the 
human scene, by the sense of property which he 
discovers in mankind. In his best work, the novels 
of the Forsyte Saga, beginning with "The Man of 
Property" and ending with "To Let" one finds him 
attributing this sense to human beings to a degree 
which is, in my belief, entirely excessive. Soames 
Forsyte, "the man of property," is portrayed to us 
as a man who regards all things, human and other- 
wise, as things to be owned. His wife is a piece 
of property just as a picture or a dog is. When 
he obtains a divorce from her and marries a young 
[145] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

French girl, Annette, he treats the latter as a 
piece of valuable property useful for the purpose 
of producing a still more valuable piece of prop- 
erty; and when Annette bears a daughter to him, 
he is left exclaiming almost passionately that this 
child is his, not hers .and his, but his! All the 
members of the Forsyte family, described with 
great particularity, are possessed of this sense of 
property, but it is more highly developed in 
Soames than in any of them. Even those mem- 
bers of it, like young Jolyon Forsyte, who break 
with the family tradition, concentrate on this prop- 
erty point. They only differ from the rest of the 
family in being anti-, rather than pro-, property. 
None of them seems to be indifferent to property. 
The dominating influence in their lives, either 
for happiness or for misery, is property. Mr. 
Galsworthy states of them that as they watched the 
funeral of Queen Victoria, they felt that they were 
burying more history for their money than had 
ever been buried before. One of the Forsyte 
women loves the statement of Christ that "In My 
Father's house are many mansions" because it com- 
forts her sense of property. Most of the conflict 
in the Galsworthy novels springs from the re- 
[146] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

actions of the characters to this sense, and it is 
laboured to the point of attenuation. The tempera- 
mental differences between Soames and Irene 
Forsyte in "The Man of Property" are obscurely 
stated, and still more obscurely stated in the 
dramatized version of their relationship called 
"The Fugitive," in which Soames and Irene become 
George and Clare Dedmond, and Bosinney, the 
architect-lover, becomes Malise, the journalist- 
lover. It is true that the differences which break 
a marriage are sometimes the result of funda- 
mental things which cannot be described with the 
clarity of the items in an auctioneer's catalogue; 
but the business of an artist is to make obscure 
things plain and understandable, and the success 
of his work depends upon the way in which he 
impresses his readers with the vagueness and ob- 
scurity of these things and yet at the same time 
makes them realize how substantial they are. 
Soames and Irene Forsyte may not be able to say 
why they cannot live together, but Mr. Galswortliy 
must be able to do so and he must empower his 
readers to do so, too. A novelist gives a sense of 
inarticulateness in a character, not by making him 
so inarticulate that the readers cannot hear or 
[147] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

understand a word lie is saying, but by making 
his inarticulateness articulate. The danger into 
which many writers tumble headlong is that they 
will spend all their energies on getting the de- 
tails right and will leave the general effect ob- 
scure. One sees signs of this in Mr. Galsworthy's 
work. He is so busy endowing his people with a 
sense of property that he occasionally omits to en- 
dow them with a sense of humanity. If one com- 
pares the Forsyte novels, say, "In Chancery," with 
Mrs. Edith Wharton's latest book, "The Age of In- 
nocence," one discovers that in each case, the theme 
is concerned with the institution of the family, with 
the tribal instinct which makes the majority of 
minds seek identity rather than dissimilarity. But 
in Mrs. Wharton's book, this tribal instinct is hu- 
manly expressed, whereas in Mr. Galsworthy's it is 
not. I recognize Mrs. Wharton's people as human 
beings, but I am sceptical about Mr. Galsworthy's 
people. Old Mrs. Mingott, in "The Age of Inno* 
cence," has affinity with old Jolyon Forsyte in "The 
Man of Property" and "The Indian Summer of a 
Forsyte." (He is the most human figure in the 
Saga.) But the rest of the cast in the Forsyte 
Saga has less relevance to humanity than the rest 
[148] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

of the cast in "The Age of Innocence," and the rea- 
son is, I think, that Mr. Galsworthy has allowed his 
theory to get the better of his people, whereas 
Mrs. Wharton, whatever her theory may be, has 
kept her eye very steadfastly on human beings. 
The Countess Olenska in "The Age of Innocence" 
has verisimilitude which is absent from the figure 
of Irene Forsyte in "The Man of Property" or 
Clare Dedmond in "The Fugitive." We can com- 
prehend Ellen Olenska, but Irene Forsyte utterly 
eludes us. 



One entertains oneself with noting how differ- 
ently an experience of life presents itself to Mr. 
Galsworthy from the way in which it presents it- 
self to Mr. Bernard Shaw. Mr. Galsworthy sends 
Falder, in his play "Justice," to prison and flattens 
him out. Mr. Shaw sends Margaret Knox and 
Bobby Gilbert, in "Fannie's First Play," to prison 
and amazingly enlarges their lives. What utterly 
depresses Mr. Galsworthy, stimulates and even ex- 
alts Mr. Shaw. If Mr. Galsworthy tortures us to 
the point at which we wish to rush out of the theatre 
[149] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

and raze Wormwood Scrubbs and Pentonville to 
the ground, Mr. Shaw causes us to feel that each 
of us might be considerably benefitted by a sojourn 
there. Mr. Galsworthy sees a goal as a place 
where thought is destroyed or embittered: Mr. 
Shaw sees it as a place where thought is provoked 
and clarified; and between them, a simple-minded 
person cannot make up his mind whether to sub- 
scribe to the funds of the Howard League for 
Penal Reform or to advocate penal servitude for 
every one in the interests of Higher Thought. Ad- 
versity, says Mr. Galsworthy, knocks a man down. 
Adversity, says Mr. Shaw, braces him up. The 
first statement may fill a man with pity, but the 
latter is more likely to make a hero of him. 



VI 



I like "The Country House" and "Five Tales" 
and "To Let" better than anything else that Mr. 
Galsworthy has written. The human sense is more 
truly felt in these books than in any others that he 
has done. There are few figures in modern fic- 
tion so tender and beautiful as Mrs. Pendyce in 
"The Country House" and few figures so im- 
[150] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

mensely impressive and indomitable as the old man 
in the story called "The Stoic" which is the first of 
the "Five Tales." The craftsmanship of "To Let" 
is superb — this novel is, perhaps, the most techni- 
cally-correct book of our time — but its human 
value is even greater than its craftsmanship. In a 
very vivid fashion, Mr. Galsworthy shows the pass- 
ing of a tradition and an age. He leaves Soames 
Forsyte in lonely age, but he does not leave him 
entirely without sympathy; for this muddleheaded 
man, unable to win or to keep affection on any but 
commercial terms, contrives in the end to win the 
pity and almost the love of the reader who has 
followed his varying fortunes through their stupid 
career. The frustrate love of Fleur and Jon is 
certainly one of the tenderest things in modern 
fiction. Mr. Galsworthy has a love of beauty 
which permeates everything that he writes and rec- 
onciles his more critical readers to his dubious 
characterization. I suppose the truth about his 
work is that he has not sufficiently disciplined his 
feelings and, for this reason, allows his sympathies 
with his suffering people to swamp his judgments. 
He is, in every act and thought, a chivalrous man, 
and his instinct is, not to examine the facts of a 
[151] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

case, but to rush instantly and hotly to the defence 
of the seemingly defenceless. An artist is never 
indifferent to the wrongs of men, but his artistry 
prevents him from making mistakes about the per- 
sons who are suffering the wrongs. One's fear is 
that Mr. Galsworthy is inclined to allow his phi- 
lanthropy to take the place of his artistry. Even 
in that fine book, "The Country House," he some- 
times makes a formula or a trick out of some fine, 
instinctive sentiment. In the fourth chapter of 
part II, Mr. Pendyce, during a period of stress, 
treads on a spaniel's foot. 

The spaniel yelped. "D n the dog! Oh, poor 

fellow, John!" said Mr. Pendyce. 

Now, in those words, one has exemplified the acute 
penetration into people's minds and emotions which 
is discoverable in Mr. Galsworthy; but he is not 
content to leave the incident in its simplicity and 
nature. Before we have reached the end of the 
chapter, that instinctive utterance by Mr. Pendyce 
has become a rather threadbare literary trick by 
Mr. Galsworthy. Mr. Pendyce treads on the dog 
again two pages later, and Mr. Pendyce repeats 

himself exactly: "D n the dog! Oh, poor 

fellow, John!" And five pages later, he treads on 
[152] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

the spaniel a third time, and a third time he says, 

"D n the dog! Oh, poor fellow, John!" It is 

obvious, surely, that on the first occasion, Mr. 
Galsworthy made Mr. Pendyce speak from his 
heart, but on the second and third occasions he 
made him speak like a ventriloquist's doll. One 
can find many similarly inapt things even in this 
book, where Mr. Galsworthy keeps very close to 
humanity. Mr. Pendyce ejaculates, on hearing that 
his son has gone after illicit love, "What on earth 
made me send George to Eton?" when he himself 
had been educated at another school. One knows 
what Mr. Galsworthy is here trying to do, to express 
the love of tradition and custom which governs the 
life of such a man as Mr. Pendyce, but he does not 
achieve the effect by such speeches. The reader 
feels certain that whatever else Mr. Pendyce may 
have said on that occasion, he did not say, "What 
on earth made me send George to Eton?" Too 
many of his people make impotent gestures, and it 
is remarkable that these important people are 
nearly always his most idealistic characters. Such 
an one is Gregory Vigil in "The Country House" 
who constantly clutches his forehead and tilts his 
face towards the sky and generally strikes attitudes 
[153] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

of despair until one begins to feel that he is the 
weakest of weaklings. And it is extraordinary to 
observe what havoc Mr. Galsworthy, ordinarily a 
very fastidious writer, sometimes makes of the 
English language. In "The Man of Property" he 
gives a detailed description of Mrs. Septimus 
Small in the course of which he states that "an in- 
numerable pout clung all over" her face, and on 
the page immediately succeeding the one on which 
that queer description occurs, he states that Mrs. 
Small "owned three canaries, the cat Tommy, and 
half a parrot — in common with her sister Hester. 
. . ." We may, perhaps, pass "an innumerable 
pout" as an impressionistic phrase, but it is quite 
clear that carelessness caused Mr. Galsworthy 
to say that Mrs. Septimus Small owned "half a 
parrot — in common with her sister Hester" when 
what he wished to say was that Hester and she 
were joint owners of a parrot! He sometimes uses 
images which are almost ludicrous. In "Saints 
Progress," we get this curious account of an old 
woman in tears: 

A little pasty woman with a pinched yellowish face 
was already sitting there, so still, and seeming to see so 
little, that Noel wondered of what she could be thinking. 

[154] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

While she watched, the woman's face began puckering, 
and tears rolled slowly down, trickling from pucker to 
pucker. . . . 

The italics are mine. 

It is his sincerity and his chivalry and his pity 
and his sense of beauty, a little too conscious, per- 
haps, which, much more than his powers of thought, 
make us read his novels and witness the perform- 
ance of his plays. These qualities tend to become 
obsessions in him with the result that his sense of 
proportion and his verity are disorganized and he 
is led into sentimentalities, some of which, on first 
sight, have an impressive appearance which is not 
maintained after closer scrutiny. In one of his 
plays, "A Bit o' Love," he makes the chief charac- 
ter, a young clergyman, end the play with this 
prayer: 

God, of the moon and the sun; of joy and beauty, of 
loneliness and sorrow — Give me strength to go on, till 
I love every living thing. 

That is a prayer which sounds impressive until 
it is critically considered. It is not possible for 
a man to love every living thing. There are cer- 
tain things which he hates with his mind and cer- 
tain things which he hates with his instincts, and it 
[155] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

is either very difficult or impossible for him to 
control those hatreds. The best he can hope for 
is the power to restrain his hatred from active 
demonstrations. There are hatreds which he ought 
to possess, hatreds which Mr. Galsworthy himself 
possesses in a high degree; hatred of cruel men, 
hatred of oppressive men, hatred of men who pro- 
mote discord out of sheer devilish delight; but 
these hatreds are feeble in comparison with the 
instinctive hatreds most of us have without under- 
standing why we have them. To pray for strength 
to go on until one loves every living thing is, there- 
fore, to pray for the moon, and exalted desires 
which are insusceptible of realization become 
banalites. There are times, in his anger at coarse- 
ness and cruel insult and lack of pity, when Mr. 
Galsworthy attributes a degree of ruffianliness to 
people which is lacking in verity. In "Saint's 
Progress," he causes "two big loutish boys" to jeer 
at the old clergyman, Pierson, whose daughter has 
had a war-baby without being married. The two 
"loutish boys" shout after him, "Wot price the 
little barstard?" Now, I simply do not believe 
that such a thing happened or could have happened 
in London during the war. Cruelty did not mani- 
[1561 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

fest itself in just that way, and it is here, I think, 
that one discovers Mr. Galsworthy's chief dis- 
ability, the fact that his powers of observation are 
not so acute as one might reasonably expect them 
to be. There is an old saying that the looker-on 
sees most of the game — and there is some truth in 
it; but it is true also that the looker-on may be 
totally ignorant of, or misinformed about, the 
game, whereas those who are engaged in it have a 
fairly comprehensive notion of what they are do- 
ing. Mr. Galsworthy gives me the impression of 
being a looker-on at the game rather than a partic- 
ipator in it, and although he is sometimes a very 
impassioned spectator, yet he suffers from the dis- 
ability of all spectators that they are not clearly 
instructed in the principles and the prejudices of 
the contest. He is praying for strength to love 
every living thing when he should be praying for 
the power to distinguish between what is lovable 
and what is detestable, between true things and 
false things. There are few people who can de- 
pict the helplessness of dull men so skilfully and 
movingly as Mr. Galsworthy can. I doubt 
whether any of his contemporaries could so reveal- 
ingly describe the state of mind of a man, spiritu- 
[157] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

ally imperceptive and puzzled by his inability to 
understand, as Mr. Galsworthy in his novel "In 
Chancery" has described Soames Forsyte after he 
has obtained a divorce from his first wife. The 
dumb animal bewilderment of this man, still in 
love with Irene but utterly confounded by her com- 
plete revulsion from him, is done with the most ex- 
traordinary penetration; and it is scenes such as 
this, which cause his readers all the more to marvel 
at his obsessions and their attendant failures. 

One rises from a consideration of his work in 
the belief that he pities mankind, but does not love 
it. He is a spectator of our struggles rather than 
a comrade in them. He stands at the side of the 
road or perhaps on an eminence a little way off 
and watches the procession as it goes by. We feel 
certain that if we are in trouble he will display 
signs of sorrow for us, but we are equally certain 
that he will never share our common qualities and 
faults. Rabelais would have been self-conscious 
in the presence of Mr. Galsworthy, had they been 
contemporaries, and Mr. Galsworthy might have 
despised, would certainly have been uncomfortable 
with that foul physician who, nevertheless, cor- 
responded more closely to this various clay we 
[158] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

call mankind, would have known and understood 
more certainly the ups and downs of human char- 
acter, the mixture of coarseness and refinement, of 
falsity and faith, of chivalry and treachery, of 
generosity and meanness, of selfishness and unself- 
ishness, of rare and common, than Mr. Galsworthy 
is ever likely to do. Mr. Hardy, in a preface to 
"Tess of the D'Urbervilles" declares that "a novel 
is an impression, not an argument" and in those 
eight words has summarized the whole business of 
story-telling. Mr. Galsworthy can tell a story 
very skilfully. His technique is remarkable, as 
any one who has read "To Let" or seen a perform- 
ance of "Loyalties" can testify; but there are too 
many occasions when he seems to have let go his 
hold on reality and to be writing out of dim mem- 
ories which are growing dimmer. His characters 
resemble people who are hurriedly seen through a 
window by one who is ignorant of their identity 
and anxious, chiefly, to be at home. They are 
making gestures and their lips move, but the hasty 
footfarer outside cannot hear what they are saying 
and he sees only the gestures, incomplete, perhaps, 
but does not know why they are made; and because 
he knows so little, he is likely to misunderstand all. 
[159] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

I imagine that when Mr. Galsworthy goes into a 
garden, his delight in it is dashed by the thought 
that somewhere near at hand a thrush is killing a 
snail! . . . 



[160] 



GEORGE MOORE 



I WAS in Dublin on the day when the news of the 
Battle of Jutland was announced in such abrupt 
terms that most people imagined the British Fleet 
had been irretrievably defeated. The affairs of 
the Abbey Theatre, of which I was then in control, 
had been brought to a pause because of the military 
regulations imposed upon the city after the Easter 
Rising, and Mr. Moore, new from London, asked 
me to employ some of my leisure in making a 
reconciliation between Lady Gregory and Mr. 
Yeats on the one hand and himself on the other. 
I foolishly consented to see what could be done, 
chiefly because of the innocent wonder which I de- 
tected in Mr. Moore at the fact that any one could 
possibly take offence at anything he might say, 
however revelatory of private affairs it might be; 
and I spent some time in the pursuit of peace. 
Lady Gregory declared that she had no feeling 
against Mr. Moore because of what he had said 
[161] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

about her in his trilogy, "Hail and Farewell," but 
that she could never forgive the insults it contained 
to Mr. Yeats. Mr. Yeats, endeavouring to think 
deeply about the Rising, declared that he had for- 
gotten, if indeed he had ever remembered, the in- 
sults to himself in the trilogy, but that he could not 
pardon those offered to Lady Gregory. Moore 
had broken bread in her house, and then had gone 
away and made fun of her! Worse than that, he 
had belittled her work. He had said that her 
plays were not great plays and that her "Kiltartan" 
dialect was not the dialect of the people of Ireland, 
but a tortured, unrhythmic invention of her 
own! ... I proposed to them that they should 
pool their pardons and receive him into the fold 
again, but my proposal was not accepted, and so I 
set off from Lady Gregory's lodgings in Dublin to 
tell Mr. Moore, staying in the Sheibourne Hotel, 
of the failure of my mission. On the way, I en- 
countered newspaper boys, carrying placards on 
which was printed the news of the Baltic of Jut- 
land. When I got to the hotel and was shovm into 
Mr. Moore's private sitting-room, I found assem- 
bled there, Mr. Moore, white with anger and dis- 
may, "A. E.," "John Eglinton" (William Magee) 
[162] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

and the late W. F. Bailey, a Land Commissioner, 
a Privy Councillor and a Trustee of the Abbey 
Theatre, who had the most extensive acquaintance 
of any man I have ever known. Mr. Moore was 
seated in the middle of the room, looking very like 
a portrait of himself, facing his friends, who were 
huddled together on a sofa in the shadow as if 
they were three misbehaving schoolboys receiving 
a severe rebuke from their master. I could not 
tell Mr. Moore at that moment of the result of my 
mission, and in the excitement of the subsequent 
argument I forgot to do so, but I doubt whether he 
was then in a mood to care whether he was forgiven 
or not. 



II 



It is several years now since that day when I 
heard Mr. Moore haranguing Mr. Russell and Mr. 
Magee and Mr. Bailey on the Battle of Jutland, but 
my recollection of the occasion is very vivid, partly 
because I have a good memory for things which 
interest me (and none at all for things in which I 
am not interested) but chiefly because it seemed to 
me that on that day Mr. Moore definitely became 
[163] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

an old man. His age is not stated in the books of 
reference, for Mr. Moore is as reticent as an ac- 
tress on this point, but he is older than Mr. Shaw, 
who is much older than Mr. Yeats or "A. E." It 
may seem singular that he, so destitute of reserve 
in other and more intimate matters, should be se- 
cretive on this, but I fancy that his failure to pub- 
lish the number of his years is due less to vanity 
than to inability to believe that he is as old as they 
denote. Judged by the rules of arithmetic his age 
is — so much; but judged by his feelings, it is — 
much less. Facts are stubborn things, so we are 
told, demanding acceptance and unquestioned ad- 
mission, but Mr. Moore declines to accept the fact 
of time: he ignores it. But on the day on which 
the news of the Battle of Jutland was made public, 
the fact of time ceased to be ignorable, and Mr. 
Moore, for the first moment in his life, yielded to 
his years. He looked old and he talked as old 
men talk. There was a note of panic in his voice, 
of frightened urgency, and he complained bitterly 
of those who saw importance in a mean brawl in 
Dublin, but remained indifferent to an event which 
might result in the destruction of a desirable civili- 
zation. I doubt whether anything in the world had 
[164] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

ever until that day been serious to Mr. Moore in 
the sense that loss and suffering and great grief 
are serious. I am certain that he never under- 
stood why people were angry with him because of 
"Hail and Farewell." The resentment manifested 
against him by Lady Gregory and Mr. Yeats was 
to him incomprehensibly petty: the deeper resent- 
ment of other people, more grievously wounded 
by his revelations which they declared to be un- 
true, filled him with astonishment. The spectacle 
of life was so much of a spectacle to him that he 
could not conceive of it as anything else to others. 
He had made himself so completely, not a partic- 
ipant in affairs, but an observer of them, that he 
had lost the faculty of personal feeling. His in- 
terest in acts and motives was so intense that he 
could not understand any one objecting to his pry- 
ing into the more entertaining of their private re- 
lationships. Equally difficult was it for him to un- 
derstand that they should deeply disrelish the idea 
of having their affairs, intimate and even secret, 
used as material for a book by Mr. Moore. Any 
human experience, he seems to argue, particularly 
when narrated in his exquisite style, is of value to 
mankind, and it must have seemed to him that there 
[165] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

was something, not only absurd, but also disgrace- 
ful in the objection many people had to the pub- 
lication of their private concerns. Had he not 
paid tribute to privacy by omitting names or in- 
venting others than the proper ones? True, every- 
one knew who were the persons portrayed, but was 
that his fault? And since every one knew already 
of the affairs, what possible harm could there be in 
his putting them into perfect and publishable 
prose? The objection raised by some persons that 
the incidents narrated by him as facts were pure in- 
ventions was frivolous! What was truth? Mr. 
Moore, like jesting Pilate, asked the question, but 
did not wait for a reply: he published as quickly 
as he could. The three volumes which make up 
"Hail and Farewell" are remarkable and have 
much value, but it is necessary to remember that 
Mr. Moore has not always been careful in them to 
distinguish between the historian and the novelist, 
between the recorder and the inventor. There are 
many dull passages in the trilogy, especially those 
in which he relates his experiences with his kins- 
man, Mr. Edward Martyn, a charge which Mr. 
Moore would not deny, but, on the contrary, 
proudly admit, for he insists that dullness is a 
[165] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

prominent feature of all great books. It is only 
the newspapers and ephemeral books which are in- 
teresting from beginning to end, he asserts — a state- 
ment which implies that Mr. Moore has been hap- 
pier in his newspapers than most people have. 
In this matter of privacies, Mr. Moore was, and 
still is, the most complete and consistent of com- 
munists. He believes in private property, but not 
in private feelings. One imagines him, in the days 
before the Battle of Jutland, asking in puzzled 
fashion, "What do you mean v/hen you say you 
feel things? What is feeling? Why should it 
ever be private?'' "This lady is in love with that 
gentleman who is not her husband! How inter- 
esting! I shall write a book about their love for 
each other. They may object! But why? Her 
husband's feelings! . . . Now, isn't that absurd!" 
And so on. Miss Susan Mitchell, in a very en- 
tertaining, but not entirely sympathetic book, en- 
titled "George Moore," declares that he seceded 
from the Roman Catholic Church because he ob- 
jected to the secrecy of the confessional. His sins, 
he considered, were so absorbingly interesting 
that they ought to be publicly confessed rather than 
confided to an undivulging priest. The flaw in 
[167] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

Miss Mitchell's argument is her assumption that 
Mr. Moore had any sins to confess! ... 



Ill 



But on this day when the news of the Battle 
of Jutland was announced, Mr. Moore seemed, for 
the first time in his life, to realize that men and 
women do feel and suffer and bear loss; and the 
discovery instantly aged him. The War which 
had so teasingly disturbed the amenities of Ebury 
Street became in a moment something more than 
an irritating scuffle in the dark — it became an im- 
mense disaster which might make amenities for- 
ever impossible. The solidities of life were in 
process of dissolution. Literary style amazingly 
mattered less than the power of the commonest gut- 
tersnipe to kill. Mr. Bernard Shaw, in the preface 
to "Heartbreak House," exclaims, "Imagine ex- 
ulting in the death of Beethoven because Bill Sykes 
dealt him his death blow!" in a rebuke adminis- 
tered to the people who rejoiced in the news of ap- 
palling death-rolls among Germans during the War. 
But on the field itself, Beethoven and Bill Sykes 
cease to be Beethoven and Bill Sykes and become, 
[168] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

each, a very frightened man with a rifle and bay- 
onet and a strong desire to live. In that dreadful 
encounter, Bill Sykes would not be thinking to 
himself, "Here comes Beethoven, a great master 
of music, by whom it will be an honor to be 
killed!" but " 'Ere comes a bloody 'Un who will 
kill me unless I kill 'im!" The perception of 
what was happening in Europe, of the horrible re- 
duction of Beethovens to the level of Sykeses, of 
Shakespeares to the level of Prussian drill-ser- 
geants (for they had to come down to those levels 
if they were to have any hope of survival) made 
an old man of Mr. Moore. He threw up his hands 
and made submission to his years. I listened to 
him while he talked volubly and bitterly to "A. E." 
and "John Eglinton" and "Bill" Bailey, as people 
called him, and marvelled to find him displaying 
so much emotion over the naval disaster and its 
probable consequences. He had written a preface 
for his brother. Colonel Moore's life of their fa- 
ther, in which he had romantically stated that 
George Henry Moore, his father, had committed 
suicide because his heart was broken by the dis- 
honourable behaviour of politicians. Colonel 
Moore printed the preface, but denied the state- 
[169] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

ment about his father, to which, however, George 
still romantically clings. An English newspaper, 
The Observer, in its issue for Sunday, April 10, 
1921, printed the preface which Mr. Moore had 
written for a new book to be published very soon 
thereafter. In this preface, he very interestingly 
described the way in which he was educated, and 
in the course of it occurred this paragraph: 

He was unhappy in the strife, for he loved his father; 
his father was always, and still is, the intimate and 
abiding reality of his life, and the evening that his fa- 
ther started for Ireland for the last time is quick among 
his memories. George's father returned from the front 
door to bid his son good-bye, and in obedience to a sud- 
den impulse he took a sovereign out of his pocket and 
put it into the boy's hand, and went away to his death 
resolute, for he had come to see that his death was the 
only way to escape from his embarrassments, without 
injury to his family, and I can imagine him walking 
about the lake shores bidding them good-bye for ever. 

I suppose that if George Henry Moore were to 
rise from the grave and deny that he had died by 
his own hand, his son and heir, George, would mur- 
mur aggrievedly, "You know, father, you are 
spoiling a very charming story! . . ." He is still 
sufficiently insensitive not to understand that lif§ 
[170] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

is something more than material for the story- 
teller's art — he may, perhaps have relapsed from 
the state of understanding to which the Battle of 
Jutland brought him, — but for that time, at all 
events until the news of the Battle was amended, 
George Moore knew what private feelings were, 
even although he could not keep them to himself. 
"A. E.," looking woolly and worried, seemed to be 
completely deprived of his powers of speech by 
Mr. Moore's angry rhetoric. "John Eglinton," a 
scholarly essayist and the sanest man in Dublin, 
having much respect for, but no delusion about, 
the ancient Gaelic literature of whicfh we hear so 
much and see so little, remained customarily mum. 
Mr. Bailey, nervously garrulous as a rule, ut- 
tered jerky, but inarticulate, sounds to which Mr. 
Moore paid absolutely no heed. I discreetly sat 
in a corner and did not make a sound. The words 
flov/ed steadily from Mr. Moore's lips — hot de- 
nunciation of the Rising, contemptuous references 
to Kuno Meyer, rebukes for "A. E." (discovered 
to have flaws) and a tremendous indictment of 
German culture, with a proviso in favour of Ger- 
man music, together with admiring references to 
France, to French literature and to the French 
[171] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

Impressionists, particularly Manet. A waiter in^ 
truded into the room for some purpose and was 
ordered out again. . . . 



IV 



Of all that Mr. Moore said on that extraordinary 
occasion, I remember most his sudden outburst into 
what he called practical politics. He demanded 
the impeachment of Mr. Asquith, the restoration of 
the Coronation Oath and the abolition of all dogs! 
The comic incongruity of those three items in a 
plan to win the war was apparent neither to him 
nor his three elderly auditors, or so it seemed, and 
I deemed it wise to control my laughter. Mr. 
Moore declared that Mr. Asquith's inertia, of which 
we were hearing so much then, was certain to bring 
defeat to the Allies. One of Mr. Asquith's daugh- 
ters had sat beside Mr. Moore at dinner one night 
in London and had informed her neighbour that 
"Father is bored with the War!" whereupon Mr. 
Moore informed her (or so he said) that her 
father's boredom might cause the Allies to lose the 
War. Mr. Asquith was guilty of more serious 
crimes than that: he had ruined the Irish gentle- 
[172] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

man and delivered the country over to hobblede- 
hoys and low minded peasants. Not content with 
ruining Ireland, no longer fit to be inhabited by 
gentlemen, fit only to be the country of publicans, 
pawnbrokers, priests and politicians, Mr. Asquith 
had tried to make equal ruin in England. He has 
abolished the Coronation Oath which, until his ad- 
vent, had always been administered to the kings 
of England at dieir crowning. In this Oath, they 
declare their belief that the Mass is an idolatrous 
ceremony, not to be acknowledged by reasonable 
persons and likely to be accepted only by vulgar 
Papists. Mr. Asquith, mindful of the fact that 
many hundreds of thousands of Catholics are mem- 
bers of the British Commonwealth of Nations, de- 
cided that the kings of England should not be hu- 
miliated and embarrassed at their coronation by 
the compulsion to insult the faith of many of their 
subjects; and so he introduced a Bill into Parlia- 
ment to abolish the Oath, which was, in due time, 
abolished. Mr. Moore seemed to think that all 
the evils from which mankind has suff"ered since 
1914 directly sprang from that political achieve- 
ment. 

As for dogs, these abominable animals, he said, 
[173] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

are nuisances at any time, but during a war and 
period of food shortage, they are a positive men- 
ace to the country. He begged us to consider (a) 
the great quantity of food consumed by dogs, (b) 
the amount of nervous irritability brought about 
by their incessant yapping, and (c) the extent to 
which they defile the streets. He threatened us 
with famine, insanity and, finally, plague! . . . 
There is an English poet who is also a breeder of 
bulldogs. Whenever he reads one of Mr. Moore's 
periodical canine denunciations, he becomes so 
enraged that only the strongest efforts of his friends 
prevent him from emptying the contents of his ken- 
nels on to Mr. Moore's doorstep that they may 
there do their worst. The ambition of his life is 
to see one of his bulldogs fasten its teeth firmly in 
the calf of Mr. Moore's venerable leg. 



• • • 



All that has been written here so far will seem 
to support the superstition that Mr. Moore is a 
trifler with life, that he is a man destitute of se- 
rious purposes; but I am anxious to make plain to 
my readers that this superstition is a superstition. 
[174] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

His lack of reticence about his own and other 
people's affairs and his perverse incursions into 
what he imagines to be practical politics are ob- 
viously responsible for the belief that he is what 
is called "a typical Irishman," that is to say, a 
man without a sense of responsibility. My ex- 
perience is that "typical Irishmen" are generally 
discovered to be Englishmen or Welshmen or New 
York East Side Jews — the late Padraic Pearse, 
Mr. Arthur Griffith and Mr. de Valera correspond 
to those descriptions — but it is undeniable that 
Mr. Moore, not without deliberation, has helped 
to maintain the legend that Irishmen are without 
a sense of responsibility. When, for example, 
during one of the many Home Rule crises, he sug- 
gested that the trouble between the two islands of 
Great Britain and Ireland might easily be settled 
by intelligent engineers, many persons were of the 
opinion that a man who could talk such twaddle, 
as they called it, in a time of much difficulty ought 
to be imprisoned. The proposal, when the details 
were disclosed, confirmed pessimists in their pro- 
found belief that the unsurmountable obstacle to 
the solution of Irish affairs is the Irish themselves! 
What Mr. Moore suggested was this: that a thick 
[175] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

wall should be built across the North Channel be- 
tween the Giant's Causeway and the Mull of Kin- 
tyre, and that another thick wall should be buih 
across St. George's Channel between Carnsore 
Point and St. David's Head. These operations 
completed, the engineers should then pump out all 
the water in the Irish Sea, fill in the resultant gap 
with earth, and make one island out of two! He 
seemed not to have considered the case of Liver- 
pool. What, some one jestingly demanded, would 
become of that great port when deprived of its 
"pool"? What also, he might have added, would 
become of Belfast and Dublin, deprived, the one 
of its Lough, and the other, of its Bay? Mr. 
Moore might have retorted that what Ireland lost on 
Belfast Lough it would more than gain on Galway 
Bay, but he preferred to remain silent. One 
could, of course, draw a conclusion, packed with 
thought and judgment, from Mr. Moore's playful 
proposal, and I do not doubt that siich was his in- 
tention; but the average person is either too busy 
or disinclined to draw such conclusions from any- 
thing; and so, having glanced casually at the de- 
tails of Mr. Moore's plan to settle the Irish Ques- 
tion, he turned impatiently away, convinced (a) 
[176] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

that Mr. Moore was an incorrigible buffoon, and 
(b) that the government of Ireland must ever re- 
main an unsolved problem because of the Irish 
people's amazing inability to conduct themselves 
reasonably ! 

But Mr. Moore has a serious purpose in life, 
and he pursues that serious purpose with inde- 
fatigable industry. The immediate and unmis- 
takable fact about him is that he is an artist. 
There are few writers in English, not even ex- 
cepting Mr. Conrad, who have so much power over 
words as is possessed by George Moore, and this 
power has been achieved, as all power is achieved, 
by incessant labour and the most pure devotion. 
He is, in the real sense, a self-made man. The 
artistry that is undeniably his has been wrought not 
only in the sweat of his brain, but in face of power- 
ful obstacles. His position as the heir of a fairly 
well-to-do landowner in Ireland might have re- 
sulted in him becoming a minor poet, publishing 
tiny verses in tiny volumes, or a small author of 
fragile essays about butterflies and pierrots. He 
did, in fact, begin his writing career, as most re- 
putable writers do, by composing poems, but he 
speedily turned to prose. He actually published 
[177] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

verses in books entitled "Flowers of Passion" — a 
name which incongruously suggests Baudelaire and 
Ella Wheeler Wilcox— and "Pagan Poems," but, 
SO far as I have been able to discover, no one has 
ever seen these books or read the poems contained 
in them. The first was published in 1877 and the 
second in 1881 and we may conclude that they 
have been dissolved by the chemicals of time. 
Miss Mitchell, in the book to which reference has 
already been made, states that "nobody in Ireland 
has ever seen any of Mr. Moore's paintings ex- 
cept 'A. E.' to whom he once shyly showed a head, 
remarking that it had some 'quality.' 'A. E' re- 
mained silent." The poems remain under the 
same kindly condemnation. The favourable for- 
tune which might have made a minor poet, and 
nothing but a minor poet, out of Mr. Moore was 
one of the powerful obstacles to his becoming a 
master of prose. 

The other was the attempt made by his father 
to influence his mind. In the preface from which 
I have already made a brief quotation, he gives an 
account of his education at the Roman Catholic 
school of Oscott. George, it seemed, had a reti- 
cence in his childhood which he remarkably lost in 
[178] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

maturity: he refused to confess his sins on the 
singular ground that he had not got any sins to 
confess. He had not then learned, seemingly, that 
he who has not got any sins to confess, can 
easily invent a few. The story of this episode 
is fully narrated in "Hail and Farewell," 
but in the new preface Mr. Moore summarizes it 
and tells how his father was summoned to Oscott 
by the president of the school "to inquire into his 
son's lack of belief in priests and their sacra- 
ments." The upshot of the business was that the 
boy, "not only the last boy in the class, but in the 
last class in the school — in a word, the dunce of 
the school" was removed from Oscott for private 
instruction at home in Mayo. "George's case is 
really very alarming," the president wrote to his 
father, and the letter contained the admission that 
he did not know whether George would not or could 
not learn. 

It is exceedingly illuminating to observe how his 
prose style has grown through a series of very di- 
verse books into its present condition. One of 
his most remarkable novels, as it is also one of his 
earliest, "A Mummers Wife," was clearly written 
under the influence of Zola, but with such indi- 
[179] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

vidual quality that Zola might profitably have 
taken lessons from his pupil. The difference be- 
tween Emile Zola and George Moore is that while 
Zola never forgot to be a doctrinaire, Moore never 
forgot to be an artist. "A Mummer's Wife" was 
unaccountably banned by the circulating libraries 
in England, and, such is the conservatism of these 
remarkable institutions, that I believe the ban is 
still maintained, although a generation has arisen 
which regards it as very restrained indeed. The 
style in which it is written is somewhat arid, and 
the reader is not carried forward by the flow of 
the story itself, but is forced along by its weight. 
A comparison between "A Mummer's Wife," or 
"Esther Waters," and such later books as "The 
Lake" or "The Brook Kerith" reveals such a dif- 
ference in manner that the critic has some difficulty 
in believing that all four novels came from the 
mind of the same author. Mr. Wells is a writer 
with many manners, but the reader can discover a 
unifying characteristic, unmistakably Wellsian, in 
all of them. Mr. Shaw, a more consistent author 
than most men of his quality, has kept so closely 
to one level that the difference between his earliest, 
his best and his latest work is merely the difference 
[180] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

of degree between growing powers, highest powers 
and declining powers. The style in the novels, 
"Love Among the Artists," "The Unsocial Social- 
ist," "The Irrational Knot" and "Cashel Byron's 
Profession" is the same style, under less control, 
as the style of "Man and Superman," "John Bull's 
Other Island," "Heartbreak House" and "Back 
To Methuselah." But in Mr. Moore's case the 
style of "A Mummer's Wife" has no obvious re- 
lationship to that of "The Lake" or "The Brook 
Kerith." The difference between the earlier books 
and the later ones is the difference between the flow 
of a river through a canal and the flow of a river 
through its natural bed. 



VI 



"A Mummer's Wife" is a powerful story, told 
in a skilful and impressive fashion, but it leaves 
the reader less conscious of life than of mechanics. 
As a piece of construction it is a better novel than 
"The Brook Kerith," but as a piece of literature 
it is not. The quality of life is dusty and arranged 
in the early book, but it is alert and vibrant and 
natural in the later one. One notable feature 
[181] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

of "A Mummer's Wife" is the display of knowl- 
edge by Mr. Moore of things and of places with 
which one would not expect him to be familiar. 
His acquaintance with grooms and horse-racing, 
manifested in "Esther Waters," is understandable 
in a man who was reared in a country-house where 
the language of the stable must have been familiar. 
But how did Mr. Moore obtain his intimacy with 
the interior of a small draper's and milliner's 
shop in one of the Five Towns in Staffordshire, 
together with his knowledge of the details of life 
lived by a touring theatrical company? Mr. Ar- 
nold Bennett's knowledge of the Five Towns and 
the interior of a small shop is explained by the 
fact that he was born in such circumstances in 
one of the Five Towns. Mr. Leonard Merrick's 
intimate knowledge of the life of a travelling 
theatrical company is explained by the fact 
that he was once an actor in such a company. 
But how did Mr. Moore, the son of a prosperous 
Irish landowner of aristocratic origin, acquire his 
close intimacy with the details of such life? It 
is this aspect of the book which reveals the exist- 
ence in Mr. Moore of a high faculty which was 
absent from the mind of his first master, Zola, 
[182] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

the faculty of imagination. Zola made his novels 
out of things actually witnessed or learned from 
books, but Mr. Moore made his novels out of his 
own imagination. Zola could only write about 
life in a small shop in a small town after he 
had actually lived in it, but Mr. Moore wrote "A 
Mummer's Wife," with no more knowledge of 
Hanley than a person passing through it might pos- 
sess, and gave his readers an impression of deep 
intimacy with it. 

This book, notable in itself, had a notable re- 
sult. It was read by a young writer, named Enoch 
Arnold Bennett, then engaged in journalism and 
the production of semi-sensational novels. Ben- 
nett was a native of "the Five Towns" district, 
bom in a place called Shelton to the north-east of 
the town of Hanley which is the scene of "A Mum- 
mer's Wife." Mr. Bennett himself told me that 
until he read "A Mummer's Wife" he never 
thought of writing about "the Five Towns." The 
Staffordshire people had no literary significance 
to him until that significance was revealed by "A 
Mummer's Wife." Mr. Bennett probably exag- 
gerates the extent of his debt to Mr. Moore. He 
would, sooner or later, have explored tlie rich mine 
[183] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

from which he produced the ore of "The Old 
Wives' Tale" and "Clayhanger" — it is ludicrous 
to imagine that but for the happy accident of 
reading "A Mumnier's Wife" he would never have 
done so — but it is not improbable that Mr. Moore's 
story brought him to his proper milieu earlier 
than he might otherwise have reached it. The 
reader can profitably entertain himself by compar- 
ing "the Five Towns," the places and the people, 
of "A Mummer's Wife" with "the Five Towns," 
places and people of "The Old Wives' Tale" and 
"Clayhanger." The difference between Mr. 
Moore's account and Mr. Bennett's is the differ- 
ence between careful and acute observation by an 
intelligent stranger, alien in birth and tradition and 
training, and the knowledge, inherited from his 
forefathers and acquired in childhood and youth, 
of a native. Mr. Moore had to "mug up" his 
subject, as schoolboys say, but Mr. Bennett was 
born with most of it. The description of Hanley 
in the first chapter of "The Old Wives' Tale" 
(where it is named Hanbridge by Mr. Bennett) 
contrasts remarkably with the description of the 
same town in "A Mummer's Wife," as does the 
description of a pottery seen through Mr. Bennett's 
[184] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

eyes in "Leonora" with that of a pottery seen 
through Mr. Moore's eyes in the fourth chapter of 
"A Mummer's Wife." These differences of de- 
scription are, of course, the result of a difference 
in temperament between the two men which is per- 
haps most clearly revealed in the way in which 
they portray old women in their books and deal 
with scenes of suffering. An intelligent reader 
of "A Mummer's Wife" and "The Old Wives' 
Tale," having made allowance for the fact that 
the first-named was written by a young man be- 
ginning his career, and the second by a man ap- 
proaching middle-age and the apex of his power, 
could draw up a fairly accurate statement of the 
character of each of the authors by comparing the 
figure of old Mrs. Ede in Mr. Moore's novel 
with that of old Mrs. Baines in Mr. Bennett's. The 
contrast between the scene of suffering pictured 
in the first chapter of "A Mummer's Wife" and 
that in the first chapter of "The Old Wives' Tale" 
would considerably assist him in making the state- 
ment. The painful insistence on the details of 
the asthma which afflicted Mr. Ede is in sharp op- 
position to the almost jocular fashion in which Mr. 
Povey's toothache is described. Both books end 
[185] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

with the death of the principal figures. Kate Ede 
dies disquietly. One might say that Constance 
and Sophia Baines also die disquietly. But there 
is a difference in the disquiet. Constance and 
Sophia had had their share of disappointment and 
trouble and had lost their illusions, but at least 
they had had their fill of life, each as she desired 
it, and if there had been disappointment, there had 
also been satisfaction: the illusions were lost, but 
while they lasted they were agreeable. Kate died 
before she had had her fill of life, without il- 
lusions and also, which is worse, without agree- 
able memories. Youth insists that life is either 
very gay or very dismal — and "A Mummer's 
Wife" was written by a young man; but Matur- 
ity knows that the colours of life are mingled rather 
than uniform, and that even when the end is a dis- 
mal one, the journey to it has not been without 
moments of fragrance and pleasure — and "The 
Old Wives' Tale" was written by a man in his 
maturity. The similarities between these two 
books are as interesting as their differences, and 
a close study of them leaves the reader at once 
aware of very dissimilar personalities and with 
enhanced respect for both of them. 
[186] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 



VII 



It is when we come to such novels as "The Lake" 
and "The Brook Kerith" that we discover Mr. 
Moore at his greatest. Zola is forgotten and only 
the strength of Mr. Moore himself is now dis- 
played. "The Lake" is among the most beautiful 
stories of our time, a finely-conceived and finely- 
wrought book, more complete and unified than 
"The Brook Kerith," which, in spite of much 
beauty and scholarship, is marred organically by 
a dispersal of the interest. The latter novel is in 
three sections, the first dealing with Joseph of 
Arimathea, the second with Jesus, and the third 
with Paul. Each of these sections by itself is 
well and even superbly done, although in my judg- 
ment, the first of them is much the best of the 
three; but the interest which the reader has in 
any one of the three sections is not felt in the 
whole book because the three great figures are not 
grouped together. We begin with Joseph and 
then, at the point when we are absorbed in him, 
are hurried on to Jesus, undergoing a similar ex- 
perience with Him when we are hurried off to 
Paul. The book is not a closely-knit drama in 
[187] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

which the characters constantly act and re-act upon 
each other, but is more akin to three separate 
plays in which certain figures recur in greater or 
less positions. Mr. Moore, in short, was uncer- 
tain whether to make Joseph or Jesus or Paul the 
hero of his story, and he unwisely compromised 
by making each of them hero for a portion of it, 
with the result that each is of supreme impor- 
tance for a third of the book and of subordinate 
importance for the remainder of it. "The Brook 
Kerith" is, nevertheless, a considerable achieve- 
ment and is in itself sufficient to secure a high 
place in English letters for its author. 

The legend is that Mr. Moore is a trifler with 
life, a man without purpose, immensely egotistical, 
having some of the simplicity of the buffoon. 
The truth is that he is an audacious, exceedingly 
adroit and utterly unthwartable artist who bends 
the visible world to his purpose of discovering 
and perfecting a formula of words with which to 
express his vision of the invisible world. He 
has, indeed, a simplicity of character, but it is 
not the simplicity of the buffoon: it is the immense 
and dissolving simplicity of the man of genius. 

[188] 



BERNARD SHAW 



There is a kind of shy, embarrassed man of 
merit who cannot keep or even reach to his proper 
position in the world without making some sort of 
pretence about himself. Mr. Bernard Shaw is 
such a man. He has created his legend with such 
extraordinary skill that those who know him well 
have great difficulty in persuading the general 
public, which has neither the time nor the intelli- 
gence to understand a man of marked personality, 
to believe that the legend is a legend, that the re- 
puted Bernard Shaw is not the real Bernard Shaw. 
The common notion is that he has an insatiable 
craving for publicity, is immensely conceited and 
self-centred, and does not care what folly of 
thought or conduct he commits if by so doing he 
draws attention to himself. The truth about him 
is that he is a shy and nervous man, singularly 
humble-minded and sincere, very courageous and 
full of quick, penetrating wisdom, and so generous 
[189] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

and kindly that he may be said to be willing to 
do more for his friends than his friends will do 
for themselves. He is a Don Quixote without il- 
lusions. When he tilts at windmills, he does so 
because they are windmills in private ownership, 
and he wishes them to be driven by electricity and 
owned by the local authority. In print and on 
platforms, Mr. Shaw brags and boasts and lays 
claim to an omniscience that would scandalize most 
deities, but no one who has the ability to dis- 
tinguish between sincerity and mere capering is 
in the least deceived by his platform conceit. He 
is one of the very few men in the world who can 
brag in public without being offensive to his audi- 
tors. He can even insult his audience with- 
out hurting its feelings. There is a quality 
of geniality and kindliness in his most violent and 
denunciatory utterance that reconciles all but the 
completely fat-headed to a patient submission to 
his chastisement; and his most perverse statements 
are so swiftly followed by things profoundly true 
and sincerely said that those who listen to him are 
less conscious of his platform tricks than are 
those who merely read newspaper reports of his 
speeches. This is largely due to the fact that the 
[190] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

newspapers print only his flippant and fantastic 
stuff, and omit his vital matter. I have seen re- 
porters at one of his meetings sitting with their 
pencils loosely dangling from their fingers while 
Mr. Shaw spoke wisely and deeply, and then, 
when he uttered some trivial or outrageous thing, 
coming to life and hastily scribbling the jape into 
their notebooks. 

It is my purpose here to insist that Mr. Shaw is 
a shy man with a large element of the gawky school 
boy in him so that he is awkward and embar- 
rassed when he comes suddenly into the presence 
of strangers without having been warned that 
strangers are to be encountered. I have seen him 
blush like a boy on finding people in a room which 
he had expected to find unoccupied, and when one 
meets him casually in the street he is at first non- 
plussed and without conversation or power to do 
more than smile amiably. It is not easy to make 
this shyness of his plain to those who have met 
him once or twice because he has remarkable 
powers of recovery and can cover up his initial 
embarrassment with very great skill; and also be- 
cause his platform manners are very easy and his 
general social manners are exceedingly gracious. 
[191] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

He has made many pretences in his life, but the 
one pretence that he has never succeeded in main- 
taining is the pretence that he is a bad-mannered 
man. There are stories told of him that seem to 
show him in a graceless, even cruel, character, but 
these are no more than might be expected from a 
man of nervous temperament who is being bothered 
excessively by the demands of people who have 
no right to make demands on him at all. Against 
those stories may be set far more stories of acts 
of exceptional kindliness to those who are in 
trouble or in need of advice and encouragement. 
Very few great men have given so generously of 
their time and strength to helping young men of 
talent to obtain recognition as Mr. Shaw has done. 
His awkwardness of manner when taken 
unawares is very different from that of Mr. 
Yeats in similar circumstances. Mr. Shaw is shy 
and awkward with strangers, but Mr. Yeats, who 
has never been shy in his life, is only awkward. 
Mr. Shaw, because he is naturally gracious, recov- 
ers himself more quickly than Mr. Yeats, who has 
cultivated his graciousness ; and it may be said 
of them that Mr. Shaw has the manners of a man 
instinctively gentle, whereas Mr. Yeats has the 
[192] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

manners of a man who has practised deportment 
before a cheval glass. 

II 

It is obvious that a man so shy and easily em- 
barrassed as Mr. Shaw is cannot hope to make 
a swift impression upon his contemporaries unless 
he commits an outrage upon his own nature. A 
world which regards modesty as a sign of incom- 
petence, if not of actual imbecility, is slow to 
recognize the real merits of a man unless he lays 
claim to merits which he has not got. In the long 
run, the crowd pays tribute to great men, but Mr. 
Shaw was anxious that tribute should be paid to 
him immediately. Fame at the age of eighty of- 
fered few inducements to him, and post humous 
fame offered no inducements at all. He had some 
thing to say to a world disinclined to listen to him, 
and he felt that he could not persuade it to do so 
unless he first of all performed some unusual plat- 
form tricks to catch its attention. Something of 
his principle seemed to be in the mind of a tipster 
whom I saw on Epsom racecourse before the war 
began. I was walking in the crowd on the course, 
[193] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

which the police were not yet clearing, when sud- 
denly a very well-dressed man in my neighbour- 
hood seemed to go out of his mind. He whirled 
violently round, uttered a fierce yell, flung an ex- 
pensive silk hat into the air and waved his gold- 
headed cane in a very disturbing fashion. He then 
began to chant in a manner not unlike the way in 
which Mr. Vachel Lindsay recites his poem on the 
Congo! ... By the time he had finished this per- 
formance, a considerable crowd had collected 
around him. I was in the forefront of it, and 
while I was wondering how long it would be before 
the police arrived to take charge of the demented 
man, he recovered his sanity and proceeded to sell 
tips for the two-thirty race. I bought one of them. 
I put money that was rare and precious on the 
horse which he commended to my patronage. And 
the horse lost the race! . . . Mr. Shaw climbed on 
to platforms and into newspapers, shouting at the 
top of his voice, "I am better than Shakespeare" 
in the hope that he might convince the world that 
he had any merit at all. He performed tricks in 
public in order to make people believe that he 
could think in the theatre. He wore comic clothes 
and refused to shave and conducted a rebellion 
[194] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

against evening dress and silk hats and boiled 
shirts. He declined to eat meat, to smoke tobacco 
or to drink wine. He said that he was an atheist 
and an immoral writer. He tried to train his 
eyebrows into the shape which is called Mephisto- 
phelian. He saw himself in the role of the Fat 
Boy in "Pickwick Papers" trying to make men's 
flesh creep, and was disgusted to find that the Fat 
Boy's most valuable asset, his obesity, had been 
denied to him and given to Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, 
who would not make any one's flesh creep for the 
value of the world ! Finally, he announced that he 
was a Socialist. His Socialism was not a plat- 
form trick: it was his serious faith; but it became 
so associated in the public mind with his platform 
tricks that he had only to say in public that he was 
a Socialist and his audience would giggle as if that 
were the most amusing thing they had ever heard. 
This habit of performing platform tricks un- 
doubtedly drew a large crowd to listen to him, and 
he did not fail to deliver himself of his peculiar 
faith to that crowd when he had collected it; but 
there were considerable drawbacks to his method 
of securing attention. The crowd could never 
quite rid itself of the belief that he was "one of 
[195] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

those comic chaps." It admitted that he was a 
very clever "comic chap," but firmly at the back 
of the popular mind was the belief that he did not 
mean one half of what he said and was not entirely 
sincere about the remaining half. It liked to see 
him performing in public, and it paid large sums 
of money to hear him lecture in behalf of causes 
tliat were abhorrent to it. Duchesses, for example, 
contributed heavily to the funds of Socialist soci- 
eties simply for the privilege of hearing him speak, 
and duchesses do not love Socialist societies. The 
crowd talked about him to a remarkable extent; 
it read his books; it attended performances of his 
plays; it went to hear him lecture . . . but it in- 
sisted that what was important about him was, 
not his advocacy of this or that, but his power to 
excite laughter. When he was most in earnest, the 
crowd said, "He's so witty!" and left the matter 
there. That, perhaps, is why "Common Sense and 
the War" aroused so much wrath in England. 
The crowd, accustomed to tittering behind its 
hand or laughing outright at Mr. Shaw's wit, was 
disconcerted by the serious way in which he dealt 
with the War in that notorious pamphlet. It was 
so shocked by what he said that it professed to be 
[196] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

indignant that any man could cut comic capers at 
so awful a moment. Mr. Shaw was not cutting 
any capers, comic or otherwise, but the crowd, 
trained by him to believe that he was a comedian, 
could not believe that he was capable of being any- 
thing else. That pamphlet, ill-timed, perhaps, in 
some respects, was yet well-timed in this respect, 
that it reminded the British people of their most 
priceless privilege, the right of free speech. The 
whole of the British press collapsed before the 
Press Censor, and editors were afraid to open their 
mouths about things which were scandalous. Mr. 
Shaw restored the freedom of the press. He said 
what he had to say and he said it with the utmost 
courage and force, and within a week or two from 
the date of publication of his pamphlet, the timid 
editors were rearing up their heads and daring to 
say "Bo!" to the political geese. 

There were times, perhaps, when he seemed to be 
yielding to the mob's desire to be tickled, when 
the one thing apparently that moved him was his 
delight in making the crowd giggle and guffaw; 
and now and then his friends felt that he was over- 
doing the tricks, that he was monotonously inform- 
ing people that he was "better than Shakespeare," 
[197] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

a Statement that seemed as idle as if Anatole 
France were to say that he was "better than" Vic- 
tor Hugo, when in fact the men are so dissimilar 
that there is no means of comparing them. But the 
danger, such as it was, amounted to little, for when 
all the discount is made that can be made for pos- 
sible charlatanry in his character, there remains 
this indisputable fact that he has left a mark on 
the thought and life not only of the English-speak- 
ing world, but of the whole of Western civilization, 
which cannot be eradicated. We may go to the 
theatre to laugh at Mr. Shaw, but we remain to 
think with him. 



Ill 

Oddly enough, there was another dramatist, also 
an Irishman, whose practice was precisely the op- 
posite of Mr. Shaw's: a shy, nervous man who per- 
mitted himself to be cheated of a position of au- 
thority because of his modesty. John Millington 
Synge was what Mr. Shaw might have been had 
he allowed his nature to run off to dark corners and 
hide itself. Synge could not compel himself to 
climb on to platforms or make extravagant boasts. 
[198] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

He may have had the desire to make boasts, but 
he had not the courage to do so. An excellent 
comrade for an individual on a country road, he 
was so nervous in the presence of an audience of 
more than six people that he was in danger of 
physical sickness, and he may be said to have died 
of sheer inability to assert himself. Had it not 
been that Mr. Yeats was by to do Synge's boasting 
for him, the world might never have heard of that 
singular man of twisted talent. Mr. Yeats, indeed, 
boasted so loudly of Synge's gifts that superficial 
persons began to believe that Synge was the greater 
man of the two, and I remember on one occasion 
hearing young women, fresh from Newnham, 
boldly declaring that Mr. Yeats's chief title to re- 
memberance would lie in the fact that he had dis- 
covered Synge! I have never been able to con- 
vince myself that Synge was a great man of genius; 
it is not necessary to convince oneself that Mr. 
Yeats is a great man of genius: the fact is obvious. 
Synge was a man of peculiar and interesting talent 
whose work smelt too strongly of the medicine bottle 
to be of supreme merit. He was the sick man in lit- 
erature, and he had the sick man's interest in 
cruelty and harshness and violent temperaments. 
[199] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

He had the weak man's envy of strength and the 
weak man's tendency to mistake violence for 
Strength. His plays are better than Mr. Yeats's 
plays — "Riders to the Sea" is immeasurably better 
than "Kathleen ni Houlihan" — but Mr. Yeats is a 
greater poet than Synge was a dramatist. I am 
disinclined to believe that Synge was a great dram- 
atist. He brought a desirable element of bitter- 
ness and acrid beauty into the sticky mess of self- 
satisfaction and sentimentalism which is known 
as Irish Literature, but I feel that he was lack- 
ing in staying-power. He shot his bolt when he 
wrote "The Playboy of the Western World," the 
chief value of which lay in the fact that it ripped 
up the smugness of the Irish people, than whom 
there are no other people in the world so pleased 
with themselves on such slender grounds, and 
taught them the much-needed lesson that they are 
very like the rest of God's creatures. Synge por- 
trayed the Irish people faithfully as he saw them: 
he put in the element of poetry in the Celtic char- 
acter, but he also put in the element of cruelty; he 
put in the wit and generosity, but he also put in 
the dullness and the greed ; he put in the gallantry, 
but he also put in the cowardice; he put in the no- 
[200] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

bility, but he also put in the gross brutality. In 
other words, he saw at the same time the idealism 
of Padraic Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh per- 
meated by the incredible brutality of De Valera's 
ruffians. He knew the delicate sense of beauty 
which suffuses the poetry of Mr. Padraic Colum 
and he smelt the odour of the charnel-house that 
rises from the work of Mr. James Joyce, and had 
he been able to keep the two sides of Irish char- 
acter justly poised, he would have been a great 
man of genius; but he was not able to keep the 
balance between them. He tended more and more 
to see merit in cruelty and harshness, and he turned 
away from the sensitive and delicate beauty of Mr. 
Colum to the sewer-revelations of Mr. Joyce, who 
may fitly be described as Rabelais after a nervous 
breakdown. People tell me that "Deirdre of the 
Sorrows," his unfinished play, is the greatest of 
all the plays that have been written about that un- 
happy and romantic lady; and perhaps what they 
say is true, for none of the plays that have been 
written about her, Mr. Herbert Trench's or "A. 
E.'s" or Mr. Yeats's, are in the great line, though 
all of them are interesting. But judged by itself 
or in relation to plays generally, it does not seem 
[201] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

to me to be a great drama nor is it so meritable as 
some of Synge's own plays of earlier origin. It 
marks to me the limit of his range, and shows 
signs of drooping energy. Some may say that I 
am attributing to failing powers what should be 
attributed to sickness and the imminence of death, 
but I think I am dealing justly with this odd in- 
truder into the realm of letters when I say that his 
talent was a small one and that had he lived for 
twice as many years as he actually did live, he 
would not have produced anything of greater note 
than he had written when he died. 



IV 



Platform tricks saved Mr. Shaw from falling to 
the Synge level. Contact with rude men and 
ruder women in public places kept him in familiar 
alliance with normal things, and so it came about 
that his genius, though it soared, never soared out 
of sight. He marched ahead of the crowd, but he 
never went so far ahead of it that it could not 
catch up with him. He urged reluctant men and 
women to follow him along the paths that were 
obscure and difficult, but he never urged them to 
[202] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

try a path which he had not himself explored, or 
was unwilling to explore. Not all of his advice 
was accepted . . . not all of it was worthy of 
acceptance . . . but all of it, accepted or re- 
jected, was listened to. He would have found a 
readier agreement to take his advice if he had been 
less logical in his arguments, but his mind governs 
his life so completely that he cannot make any al- 
lowances for the wayward character of the aver- 
age man. He has given himself so completely to 
his mind that his feelings seem to have atrophied. 
He is incapable, apparently, of understanding the 
beauty and fascination of mere irrelevancy. A 
study of his work reveals no consciousness on his 
part of natural beauty. He seems not to know 
that a tree is a lovely thing, that its loveliness is 
entirely without moral or sociological significance. 
He would probably agree with Dr. Johnson that one 
field is very like another field, that water in one 
part of the world is identical with water in another 
part of the world . . . and would be just as re- 
mote from the truth as Dr. Johnson was: for one 
field is not like another field, and water in one 
place can be very dissimilar in look from water 
in some other place. Mr. Shaw would not suffer 
[203] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

one pang at the destruction of St. Paul's Cathedral 
if he felt that its destruction made the processes 
of life more convenient to the ordinary citizen. If 
he had to choose between Rheims Cathedral and an 
improved drainage system for France ... a thing 
which France very badly needs, as any one with a 
nose can tell ... he would choose the drainage 
system. The College of Cardinals is less lovely 
in the eyes of Mr. Shaw than the members of a 
Borough Council. He would rather possess a good 
fountain-pen than the first folio of Shakespeare's 
plays. There was a man in Dublin who singularly 
resembled him in everything except wit. Fran'cis 
Sheehy Skeffington, who was wrongly executed in 
the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, had Mr. 
Shaw's logical faculty without Mr. Shaw's redeem- 
ing wit. He was a very honest, courageous, and 
personally attractive man, just as Mr. Shaw is, 
but he was also a very wrong-headed man and to- 
tally incapable of any sort of concerted action with 
other people. Mr. Shaw's wit brings him into 
more cordial relationship with other human beings 
than Sheehy Skeffington would ever have achieved. 
I remember, just before the war began, meeting 
Skeffington in North Wales. He, too, was insensible 
[204] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

to natural beauty and was without respect for tra- 
dition or ancient institutions. I took him one eve- 
ning to a lake in Anglesey where many reeds grew. 
I asked him to watch while I clapped my hands, 
and when I had done so, thousands of starlings 
flew out of the reeds with a great fluttering of 
wings, making a tremendous disturbance because 
they had been roused from their sleep. SkefEng- 
ton gazed at these birds as if he had never seen a 
starling before. I judged by the look of astonish- 
ment in his face that if he could have persuaded 
himself to believe in magic, he would have re- 
garded me as a magician. By merely smiting my 
hands, I had filled the air with fluttering birds! 
This experience so interested me that I decided to 
make other experiments with Skeffington, and so, 
on the following day, I took him to a field outside 
the village where some very fine druidical remains 
were to be seen. I led him up to the stones and 
waited to see what effect they would have upon 
him. He looked at them for a few moments, and 
then, quite unmoved by the fact that they had been 
standing there for more than a thousand years and 
were all that was left of an ancient religion, he 
took a piece of paper from his pocket and, mur- 
[205] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

muring in his high-pitched Ulster voice, "I think 
I'll do a little propaganda!" thrust it into a crevice 
of the old altar. The paper had VOTES FOR 
WOMEN on it! He was totally incapable of un- 
derstanding why this act of his disgusted me. His 
mind was indifferent to such things as tradition; 
he simply could not visualize those stones as any- 
thing other than a remarkably useful hoarding on 
which to advertise his latest enthusiasm. I sup- 
pose that if he thought of the druids at all, he 
thought contemptuously of them as barbarians to 
whom had been denied the enlightenment that he 
enjoyed; and his desperately logical mind, working 
on the fact that many persons would visit these re- 
mains, suggested to him that here was an excellent 
opportunity of thrusting his propaganda upon the 
attention of people reluctant to give any heed to 
it! . . . 

I cannot conceive of Mr. Shaw doing just that 
thing because his wit would save him from it; but 
I feel that if his wit were taken from him or had 
been denied to him, he would have behaved ex- 
actly as Sheehy Skeffington behaved then. It is 
his superb, spontaneous wit that keeps him in con- 
tinuous contact with normal men. Synge had no 
[206] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

wit, and because he had not, was thrust into soli- 
tude. SkefFington had no wit . . . there never 
was on earth a man so destitue of a sense of hu- 
mour as Francis Skeffington . . . and because he 
had not, he lived a life of intellectual isolation 
from his fellows in spite of the fact that most 
people liked him. Skeffington's courage and hon- 
esty . . . and I have known few men so coura- 
geous and honest as he was . . . served him partly, 
but not wholly, as Mr. Shaw's wit serves him. Mr. 
Shaw has great intellectual courage and is a very 
honest man, but these qualities, though they win 
respect in the long run, have an isolating effect on 
a man in such a world as this, and were it not for 
his wit, he would be an Ishmael, too. Take the 
wit from Mr. Shaw and the courage from Sheehy 
Skeffington, substitute for them a fractious sense of 
beauty, and the result is . . . John Millington 
Synge. 



Mr. Chesterton has illustrated the peculiar qual- 
ity of the English mind by comparing the roads of 
France with the roads of England; and the com- 
[207] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

parison might be used to illustrate the difference 
between the mind of Mr. Shaw and the mind of the 
average man. Mr. Chesterton, with that startling 
profundity that is to be discovered in much of his 
writing that seems at first merely to be conjuring 
stuff, asserts that the design of English and French 
roads, the first all winding and irregular, the sec- 
ond straight as if drawn with the aid of a ruler, 
shows a fundamental difference between the two 
races: the English as wayward and casual as their 
roads, going lazily and easily to their journey's 
end ; the French as logical and well-defined as their 
roads, going without any circumlocution to their 
journey's end. Mr. Shaw's mind goes directly to 
its goal, and he tries to persuade the rest of man- 
kind to follow his example. But the rest of man- 
kind does not wish to go by the most direct route to 
any goal : it wants to dally on the ways ; it wants to 
explore all the little bye-paths and hidden corners; 
it even wants to turn back on its course to examine 
again some place that it has already seen; and 
above all, it wants to waste time. When Mr. Shaw 
contemplates the world engaged in this careless 
way of living, he bursts into a passion of wit where 
less gifted men, such as Sheehy Skeffington, would 
[208] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

burst into anger; and he lashes the world with his 
tongue. Mankind, because Mr. Shaw is a genius, 
listens to him, as mankind always has listened to 
men of genius, in a puzzled fashion, and even spec- 
ulates on whether it ought not to follow his ad- 
vice; but it is in the nature of man to be illogical, 
and so, after a little thought, man goes on being 
wayward and casual. Even in France, where logic 
has become an obsession, men are more illogical 
than Mr. Shaw would have them be; and it is a 
very curious commentary on his work that in so 
logical a country as France, his plays make far 
less stir than in any other country in Europe. I 
imagine that the French are so cursed with logic 
that their minds revolt from the extreme reasoning 
of Mr. Shaw as an overloaded stomach revolts 
from rich food. Once, in France, when my bat- 
talion was marching along a road towards a part 
of the country in which we had been some weeks 
before, I heard a soldier in my platoon saying to 
his comrade as we came to familiar places, "Thank 
God, they've cut down those bloody trees!" and 
immediately I understood why the French roads 
bored the British soldier. That inexorable logic, 
all that neatness, those terribly straight roads with 
[209] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

the trees growing at regular intervals . . . "dress- 
ing by the right" as the soldiers said, and looking 
as if the men who planted them had performed the 
operation according to some mathematical for- 
mula ... all these things, inhumanly tidy and 
well-ordered, nauseated the mind. I have done 
much walking on English and French roads, and I 
will wager that boredom will seize the traveller on 
a French road long before his interest on an English 
road has been exhausted. And in their unintellec- 
tual, instinctive, wayward fashion, the English are 
more right about life than the French are. Mr. 
Shaw, I imagine, is incapable of understanding 
the state of mind of my soldier who thanked God 
that the neatly-arranged trees on the neatly-de- 
signed French road had been cui; down. To him 
it would seem right that if trees are to be grown 
at all, they should be grown according to formula. 
He sees something stupid and wrong in the Eng- 
lish method of planting an acorn in any hole that 
is visible and letting the tree grow as it pleases. 



[210] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 



VI 



In the chapter on Mr. Wells, I have printed an 
account of Mr. Shaw's religious faith which ought 
properly to be printed here, but since the reader 
can more easily turn to the next chapter than I 
can re-write it, I will leave the account where it is 
and proceed with an account of the latest develop- 
ments of this faith as set forth in "Heartbreak 
House" and "Back to Methusaleh." These two 
plays are notable for a growth of religious con- 
viction in their author which has brought him to a 
condition resembling, in the eyes of some, that 
of John the Baptist and, in the eyes of others (as 
I heard a clergyman of the Church of Ireland 
angrily assert) that of a religious fanatic. They 
are also notable for a weakening of technical skill 
as a dramatist. Mr. Shaw has set himself so ably 
to the task of rejecting drama from his plays, that 
unconsciously he ruins the effect of his lines by an 
excess of garrulity. No one, reading and particu- 
larly seeing, "Heartbreak House" and "Back to 
Methusaleh" can escape from the belief that Mr. 
Shaw is using more words than are necessary to 
express his thought. Either he despises us as 
[211] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

people who are not sufficiently intelligent to un- 
derstand his meaning unless it is delivered to us 
in a variety of sentences or he has lost his artistic 
sense and cannot understand that a fine morning 
is not any finer for being described somewhat in 
this fashion: "A fine morning is one on which 
the sun shines from a blue sky in which occasional 
white clouds may be seen. This morning is such 
a morning as that. Therefore, this is a fine morn- 
ing. What a fine morning!" The whole of that 
extravagant speech, invented by me, not by Mr. 
Shaw, is contained in the last four words. The 
rest is not only excess, but insult, for it implies 
an ignorance in the person listening to it which is 
not human. There are many passages in these two 
plays which are not unlike that invented passage 
of mine. There is a passage near the beginning 
of the second act of "Heartbreak House" which 
seems to me to indicate a real decline in Mr. Shaw's 
sense of the theatre. Ellie Dunn and Boss Man- 
gan, to whom she is thinking of getting engaged, 
are discussing themselves and marriage. He has 
just described himself in terms which show that 
he is one of those financial ruffians who are the 
[212] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

modern equivalent, (not of highwaymen, for they 
were gay and adventurous fellows,) but of slave- 
drivers: 

Mangan. . . . Now what do you think of me, Miss 
Ellie? 

Ellie (dropping her hands) : How strange! that my 
mother, who knew nothing at all about business, should 
have been quite right about you! She always said — 
not before papa, of course, but to us children — that you 
were just that sort of a man. 

Mangan (sitting up much hurt) : Oh! did she? 
And yet she'd have let you marry me. 

Ellie; Well, you see, Mr. Mangan, my mother mar- 
ried a very good man — for whatever you may think of 
my father as a man of business, he is the soul of good- 
ness — and she is not at all keen on my doing the same. 

The parenthetical clause in each of Ellie's 
speeches is unnecessary, and in the second speech, 
it has the effect of ruining a very good "line." I 
assert, as a dramatist with some technical skill, 
that Ellie's second speech, minus the parenthetical 
clause, will rouse laughter every time it is spoken. 
I assert, with equal confidence, that this speech, 
with the parenthetical clause, will not provoke 
more than a strangled laugh and may not provoke 
[213] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

any laughter at all. Mr. Shaw is entitled to reject 
laughter if he thinks it is likely to destroy the 
thought in his speech, but no one can believe that 
the parenthetical clause to which I object adds 
anything to Ellie's thought. It is mere redundance, 
and redundance is destructive of drama. It is 
also destructive of thought for a man is more 
likely to be irritated than to be stimulated by hear- 
ing a thing repeated to excess. 

I may, perhaps, note another matter of techni- 
cal interest to the student of the Shavian drama, 
namely, Mr. Shaw's economy in characters. He 
has or had a strong sense of the theatre which is 
almost as strong as that possessed by Mr. Gals- 
worthy. The difficulty a critic has in estimating 
Mr. Shaw's sense of the theatre is increased by 
the wilfulness with which he rejects technique: 
one is not always able to decide whether the lack 
of technique in the later plays is the result of in- 
tention or weakness. Mr. Galsworthy is nearly 
the cleverest technician now writing for the Eng- 
lish theatre. He cannot think as clearly as Mr. 
Shaw can, but he can construct much better. 
When Mr. Galsworthy treats a theme dramatic in 
[214] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

itself, such as the theme of "Loyalties," and does 
not entangle the drama with arguments, he writes 
an uncommonly good play. "Loyalties" has been 
called a "crook" play and in a sense it is one, but 
the difference between it and such a piece as "The 
Bat" by Mrs. Mary Roberts Rinehart and Mr. 
Avery Hopwood is the difference between a crook 
play written in terms of reality and a crook 
play written in terms of trick. When, however, 
Mr. Galsworthy treats a theme not dramatic in it- 
self, such as the theme of "Windows," and en- 
tangles any drama it has with much argument, 
the result is something extraordinarily diffuse and 
nebulous. Mr. Galsworthy leaves you with a sen- 
sation, not only that you do not know what he 
means, but also that he does not know what he 
means. Mr. Shaw, in his later pieces, leaves you 
with the sensation that he knows only too well what 
he means, but he will never admit that you are 
capable of understanding him. His economy in 
characters is a certain sign of his mysticism. Mr. 
Yeats told me on one occasion that when Sir Hor- 
ace Plunkett invited "A. E." to take a prominent 
position in the organization of co-operative agri- 
culture in Ireland, Mr. Arthur Balfour commended 
[215] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

the choice on the ground that a mystic is the most 
practical of men since he is willing to use any in- 
strument that will serve his purpose, whereas your 
plain, blunt business man, destitute of imagination 
and firm purpose, will quarrel with his tools and 
end up by botching his job. The mystic, more- 
over, serves his purpose more than himself, 
whereas your plain, blunt business man serves 
only himself. Mr. Shaw's method of working is 
singularly interesting as a demonstration of the 
way in which the mystic achieves his purpose. I 
do not know of any writer who is so thrifty with 
his means as Mr. Shaw. Shakespeare, compared 
with him, is a prodigal and a spendthrift. Mr. 
Shaw, compared with Shakespeare, is a miser, 
uniquely stingy. But it is not stinginess which 
has made Mr. Shaw so economical in his char- 
acters and even in his situations. It is his mys- 
ticism which makes him extraordinarily indifferent 
to his means. Any old plot, however disreputable 
it might be, would serve Shakespeare for draw- 
ing on to the stage a crowd of dissimilar persons 
and enriching their lives with his verse; and any 
old character, however remote from human sem- 
blance will serve Mr. Shaw as a vent for opinions. 
[216] 



I 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

Shakespeare primarily v/as interested in people. 
Mr. Shaw primarily is interested in doctrine. The 
principal difference between a dramatist who is 
interested in people and a dramatist who is inter- 
ested in doctrines, is that the former will delight 
in the creation of the greatest variety of charac- 
ters whereas the latter will not trouble to create 
a new character if an old one will do. I doubt 
whether there are more than twelve distinct per- 
sons in the whole of Mr. Shaw's work. When 
he began his career as a dogmatist, he set himself 
to writing novels, but found after he had written 
five, of which only four have been published, that 
he could not use this instrument so effectively for 
his purpose as he could use the instrument of the 
play. And so he turned his attention to the stage. 
But he did not waste his novels: he dramatised 
them. He lifted passages from his books and put 
them into his plays. He took some of the novel- 
characters and, after he had tidied them and 
changed their names, forced them from between 
their covers on to the stage. There is little in 
the thirty-eight plays he has written which is not 
to be found, developed or suggested, in his four 
novels. He has preached one doctrine all his life, 
[217] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

and has preached it with singular consistency. It 
is set out in the succeeding chapter to this one. 
The parsimoniousness with which it has been 
preached is remarkable. The whole of the first 
act of "Major Barbara" is almost identically a re- 
petition of the first act of "You Never Can Tell." 
Lady Britomart Undershaft, of the first piece, is 
Mrs. Clandon, of the second, under another name. 
The situation of two women is nearly the same. 
They are living apart from their husbands whom 
they have not seen for a number of years. Lady 
Britomart and Mrs. Clandon have each two daugh- 
ters and a son with the haziest or no recollections 
of their fathers. A meeting between the two 
parents and their children is arranged, in each 
case, on a flimsy pretext. Lady Britomart, like 
Mrs. Clandon, is one of those strong-minded, silly 
women who flourish, nowadays, more commonly 
in America than in England. (She is the sort of 
dense female who belongs to the Lucy Stone Lea- 
gue and refuses to bear the name of tlie man she 
has chosen to be her husband although she is will- 
ing to bear the name of the man whom she did not 
choose to be her father!) Lady Britomart, like 
Mrs. Clandon, has abandoned her husband for a 
[218] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

particularly fatuous cause- Mr. Crampton (fof 
Mrs. Clandon is really Mrs. Crampton) was de- 
prived of his wife's society (which was probably 
no great loss) and that of his children (which 
probably was) because he very properly spanked 
his elder daughter when she had been naughty. 
Lady Britomart left her husband because he de- 
clined to change the basis of his armaments- 
factory in the interests of his son. Her excuse for 
her behaviour was more natural than Mrs. Clan- 
don's excuse for hers, for we are all susceptible to 
the attractions of primogeniture; but a more sensi- 
ble woman might have achieved her purpose in be- 
ing less headstrong. Barbara Undershaft, her elder 
daughter, is Gloria Clandon, a little older and less 
priggish. Sarah Undershaft, her younger daughter, 
is a chastened and spiritless Dolly Clandon. There 
is a difference, however, between Stephen Under- 
shaft and Philip Clandon so remarkable that I can 
only surmise that Mr. Shaw in transferring the 
Clandon family into the Undershaft family mislaid 
Philip and, in searching for him, discovered an- 
other youth, this Stephen, who was the product of 
an illicit love affair between Mrs. Clandon and the 
austere Finch McComas! Adolphus Cusins, the 
[219] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

Professor of Greek who beats the big drum in the 
Salvation Army so that he may be near to Barbara, 
is Valentine, the dentist, dragged out of "You 
Never Can Tell," after a brief and misguided ca- 
reer as John Tanner in "Man and Superman." 

It is easy, I think, to trace the life of each one 
of the twelve Shavian characters in this fashion. 
Consider, for example, the vivid and very inter- 
esting career of that brutal ruffian. Bill Walker, 
in "Major Barbara." Bill began his life in 
"Widowers' Houses" under the name of Lickcheese 
and flourished so well as a speculative property- 
owner that he was able to climb into middle-class 
society, under the name of Burgess, and marry 
his daughter Candida to the Reverend James 
Mavor Morell. His association with the clergy, 
however, must have had a disastrous effect on him 
for we find him, in "Captain Brassbound's Con- 
version," leading an adventurous, but misunder- 
stood, career under the name of Drinkwater. Re- 
ligion had peculiar allurements for Drinkwater, 
understandably enough when one remembers his 
former association with his son-in-law, the clergy- 
man, and we are not surprised, therefore, to find 
him in the Salvation Army's West Ham Shelter, 
[220] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

now named Bill Walker and looking less than his 
years. He suffers terribly from the spiritual gar- 
rulity of Major Barbara. The reader who is fam- 
iliar with the play will remember that Bill cruelly 
misused a little Salvation Army lass, called Jenny 
Hill, who would keep on praying for him and turn- 
ing the other cheek. He struck her on the mouth 
and twisted her arm and almost tore her hair out 
by the roots. She cried with the pain, but she 
went on praying for him! . . . Then Major Bar- 
bara twisted Bill's heart for him as cruelly as he 
had twisted Jenny Hill's arm, by preaching with 
terrible iteration the doctrine of forgiveness and 
non-resistance. We know how Bill, at the penul- 
timate moment, escaped from the penitent form, 
but few of us realise what happened to him after 
he had fled, precipitately and full of bitter cyni- 
cism, from that Salvation Army Shelter in West 
Ham. Who could have believed, after witnessing 
his behaviour in the presence of Barbara and 
snivelling Jenny Hill, that Jenny Hill herself 
would be the means of his undoing in the wilds 
of America to which he had hurried under the 
name of Blanco Posnet? And here we discover a 
characteristic example of Mr. Shaw's sardonic hu- 
[221] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

mour. For Bill was nabbed, not by the strong 
Barbara, not even by the weak, though willing, 
Jenny, but by Jenny's helpless, croup-stricken 
child. The lion is caught by the mouse; the strong 
are brought down by the weak; a little child shall 
lead them into a trap. God, in Mr. Shaw's re- 
ligion, is not a just God: he is a God determined 
to have His own way and entirely indifferent to 
the desires of His creatures. If man will not help 
God to fulfil His purpose, then God will destroy 
man and invent another and more submissive in- 
strument whereby He may do so. Such is the 
Shavian gospel. In what respect does it differ 
from the most devastating and blasting form of 
Calvinism? When I was a child in Belfast, I 
was taught that if I persisted in being a wicked 
boy, I would be roasted for ever in a red-hot 
hell. Is there any real difference between the 
Calvinist who tells a child that he will be burned 
for all eternity and Mr. Shaw who tells it that it 
will be scrapped for all eternity. There is one 
difference, in favour of the Calvinist. I was 
taught to believe in the All-Perfection of God. 
Even if I persisted in being a wicked child and 
thus damned myself for ever, my relatives could 
[222] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

comfort themselves with the reflection that God 
would fulfil Himself in His own time. Some- 
where, somewhen, there would be "peace, perfect 
peace." But Mr. Shaw's God offers no such guar- 
antee. He cannot assure us, even if we help Him 
by every means in our power, that He will ever 
become perfect. He makes inexorable demands 
upon our service, but cannot offer us any hope 
that our labour will not be in vain. Serve me 
without question or be scrapped, says the Shavian 
God, but he will not assure us that we are not be- 
ing bilked. And is not the desolation of desol- 
ations a religious faith in which there is no cer- 
tainty and very little hope? I prefer the romantic 
delusions of my Ulster forefathers to the practical 
religion of Mr. Shaw. I dislike the thought that 
I may be roasted for ever in a red-hot hell, but 
I like even less the coal-black nullity with which 
Mr. Shaw threatens me if I persist in my evil 
courses. There will at least be colour and excite- 
ment in Calvin's hell, but there will be nothing 
whatever in Mr. Shaw's. And I am not sure, 
after all, that God, Perfect or Imperfect, will not 
prefer to spend eternity in the company of people 
like me who decline to accept life on any but their 
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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

own terms, rather than in the society of servile 
instruments. 

Mr. Shaw's thirty-eight plays are not thirty-eight 
separate plays but one long, continuous piece, in 
which his twelve characters, in every conceivable 
disguise and situation, strive to elude the hand of 
God but are nabbed by Him in the end. Twist 
how you may. He'll get you in the end, unless, 
indeed. He wearies of trying to make use of you, 
when, inexorably, without a pang, He will cast 
you on to the scrap-heap where you will perish 
utterly as your little brothers, the mammoth beasts, 
perished long ago. 



VH 



Mr. Shaw has some of Shakespeare's careless- 
ness over details. I have sometimes wondered why 
Claudius succeeded to his brother's throne when 
Hamlet was alive to do so. There is an expla- 
nation of this curious succession in Frazer's "The 
Golden Bough," but I do not suppose that the facts 
cited by Sir James Frazer were known to Shake- 
speare and even if it were, he has not made the 
matter dramatically clear. Hamlet does not ap- 
[224] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

pear to resent his uncle's accession to the throne of 
Denmark. His resentment is roused by the mar- 
riage of his mother to her brother-in-law. He 
probably never liked his uncle, but he is willing to 
live in his castle as his heir. Shakespeare was al- 
ways ready to sacrifice verisimilitude to dramatic 
effects. Ophelia, for example, is denied complete 
Christian burial because the Church authorities 
suspect her of having committed suicide, although 
the account of her death clearly establishes that she 
was accidentally drowned through the breaking of 
a branch. Hamlet, too, is unaware of Ophelia's 
death or dementia when he arrives in the grave- 
yard where she is to be buried, although he has 
been in the company of Horatio for some time, 
and Horatio is fully acquainted with the circum- 
stances of Ophelia's misfortunes and death and 
knows that there have been passages of love be- 
tween Hamlet and her. Very little trouble was 
needed to put these minor matters right, but when 
a god is creating a universe, he is unlikely to 
trouble himself greatly about specks of dust. Mr. 
Shaw shows himself equally indifferent to details 
when they no longer serve his purpose. He has 
been charged with spoofing his audience on occa- 
[225] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

sion, notably in the first act of "Man and Super- 
man" where he trumps up a case of impending ma- 
ternity for shocking effects, and then, his purpose 
achieved, says no more about it for the remainder 
of the play! He brings the Undershaft family 
together in the first act of "Major Barbara" in the 
pretence that they are about to discuss important 
questions of family finance which are never once 
discussed during the act! I do not believe that 
Mr. Shaw had any intention of spoofing his au- 
dience when he invented these situations. He 
simply did not bother about the details. He had 
used the effect for his purpose, and since it was 
no longer servicable to him, he scrapped it with- 
out even troubling to clear away the debris — which, 
presumably, is what His God will do with us when 
He no longer needs us. Less happens in the first 
act of "Major Barbara" than in any other first 
act by Mr. Shaw. It is a protasis from which all 
mention of plot is deliberately omitted. Bottom, 
had he been at Mr. Shaw's elbow while the play 
was being written, might have begged him to "grow 
to a point," but Bottom would have had lessi 
success with Mr. Shaw than he had with Quince, 
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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

for Bottom's point was a dramatic one, whereas 
Mr. Shaw's is doctrinal; and a propounder of 
doctrine pays little heeds to the laws of stagecraft 
or anything else. The mystic gets his way be- 
cause he can neither be frightened nor discon- 
certed. Death and Tradition have no terrors for 
him. That is why, in face of the opposition of 
common sense and practical experience, he always 
does what he wants to do. 

VIII 

One might profitably compare Mr. Shaw to Cas- 
sius in "Julius Caesar." Marcus Brutus, in that 
play, is surely the prototype of all muddlers and 
gentlemanly idiots. It v/as he who, against the 
pleas of Cassius, insisted that the life of Mark 
Anthony should be spared. It was he who, dis- 
regarding the dissuasions of Cassius, permitted 
Anthony to speak in the forum. It was he who, 
over-ruling the arguments of Cassius, ordered the 
disastrous march to Phillipi. Cassius was the 
wise man of the two, though his heart was made 
impotent by his asperities. The resemblance be- 
[227] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

tween him and Mr. Shaw must not be drawn too 
closely, but it is sufficient, as stated in Shakes- 
peare's terms, to be interesting: 

He reads much; 
He is a great observer, and he looks 
Quite through the deeds of men. 

Cassius, of course, loved no plays and heard no 
music and smiled with difficulty; and these disabil- 
ities prevent him from complete ancestry to Mr. 
Shaw; but, if, like Cassius, Mr. Shaw sometimes 
feels that he has lived "to be but mirth and laugh- 
ter to his Brutus," he can, like Cassius again, com- 
fort himself with the thought that he was in the 
right when Brutus was in the wrong, and that he 
told him so. His Cassius mood is plainest in 
"Heartbreak House." This play is described as 
"a Fantasia in the Russian manner on English 
themes," and was written, presumably, after Mr. 
Shaw had witnessed performances of plays by 
Chekhov. That is not to say, however, that there 
is any resemblance between the work of Mr. Shaw 
and the Russian dramatist. There isn't. Mr. Shaw 
is as talkative as Chekhov was reticent. Chekhov's 
purpose is to make his people say as little as pos- 
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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

sible: Mr. Shaw's purpose is to make his people 
say a great deal more than is necessary. Chekhov 
suggests inactivity through dialogue : Mr. Shaw sug- 
gests argumentativeness. Chekhov writes drama: 
Mr. Shaw debates. No receptive person can come 
away from a performance of "The Cherry Or- 
chard" unimpressed by a vision of life. A mod- 
erately-intelligent person, having seen this play 
with eyes of understanding, could write a true 
summary of the state of Russia in the last hun- 
dred years. I doubt whether as much can be said 
of "Heartbreak House," the whole action of which 
(though action is an inappropriate word to use 
about it) takes place in the course of an afternoon 
and evening, inside six or seven hours, in England 
soon after the outbreak of the War. There is, 
however, no mention of the War in the play, and 
the only link between them is the sudden interrup- 
tion of the conversation in the last act by an air- 
raid, as a result of which two of the characters are 
blown to pieces. There is some clumsiness in the 
use of this device for ending the play, artistically 
at all events, though that is a consideration which 
is unlikely to move Mr. Shaw much, but, ethically 
and socially, it is not clumsy at all, for "Heart- 
[229] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

break House" is less a play than a parable. The 
bombs drop as suddenly, and with as little warn- 
ing, on the gifted conversationalists sitting in the 
dusky garden as the War burst upon Europe in 
1914. There we were, all of us, living pleasantly, 
as Burke begged us to live, and committing our 
affairs into the hands of men concerning whose 
abilities to conduct them we had no certificates — 
and suddenly the ship ran on to the rocks, the train 
went off the rails, the ceiling fell. "I'm always 
expecting something," says EUie Dunn in the last 
act. "I don't know what it is; but life must come 
to a point some time." And while she and her 
companions are arguing about the responsibility 
for the mess in which the world is, bombs drop 
out of heaven and life comes to a full stop: 

Hector: And this ship that we are all in? This 
soul's prison we call England? 

Captain Shotover: The captain is in his bunk, drink- 
ing bottled ditch-water; and the crew is gambling in the 
forcastle. She will strike and sink and split. Do you 
think the laws of God will be suspended in favour of 
England because you were born in it? 

Hector: Well, I don't mean to be drowned like a rat 
in a trap. I still have the will to live. What am I to 
do? 

[230] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

Captain Shotover: Do? Nothing simpler. Learn 
your business as an Englishman. 

Hector: And what may my business as an English- 
man be, pray? 

Captain Shotover: Navigation. Learn it and live; 
or leave it and be damned. 

In other words of Mr. Shaw's, if you do not help 
God to perfect Himself, He will scrap you. This 
play, in some respects the best that Mr. Shaw has 
written, is full of mad laughter, of bitter, self- 
mocking, torturing laughter. I knew a man who 
burst into shrieks of laughter when he saw a 
comrade blown into the air by a German shell; 
but if any one imagines that that man's terrible 
mirth came from an unkindly heart, he imagines 
without understanding; for "even in laughter the 
heart is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is 
heaviness." I feel about "Heartbreak House" ex- 
actly as I felt about my friend who laughed when 
his comrade was blown up and dismembered: that 
here is a depth of feeling which cannot be fath- 
omed. Like Job, Mr. Shaw cries out, "changes 
and war are against me," but, unlike Job, he finds 
no comfort in the end. "If men will not learn 
until their lessons are written in blood, why, blood 
[231] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

they must have, their own for preference." As for 
him, he throws up the sponge. Our cuhure is but 
the plaything of fribbles ; our democracy is merely 
government of fools by fools. "The question is," 
said Boswell to Dr. Johnson and Mr. Cambridge, 
"which is worst, one wild beast or many?" And 
the answer, in Mr. Shaw's terms, is "Both!" He 
sees man, according to this play, refusing to help 
God to perfect Himself, deliberately thwarting 
God, and he almost sees him already on the scrap- 
heap. 

In "Back to Methusaleh," he seems to me to 
have suffered a spiritual set-back, and to be pre- 
occupied by material considerations. We are no 
longer concerned with Man's Destiny and God's 
Purpose, but with matters of mere longevity. "So 
much to do — so little time in which to do it!" 
If man could live for three hundred or three thou- 
sand or thirty thousand years, he would then have 
time in which to profit by his experience — so Mr. 
Shaw's argument seems to run. But would he? 
Do any of us profit by our experience? If we 
could go back to the beginning of our lives and 
start again with the knowledge we had acquired in 
[232] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

the previous existence, we might be able to avoid 
this or that mistake. But we cannot do that. Each 
experience is a new one, and the wisdom we have 
gained from those through which we have passed 
is of little help to us in dealing with the new one, 
particularly if it comes upon us, as most of the 
critical events of life do come upon us, unex- 
pectedly, without warning. There is not much 
difference, except physically, between the Mr. 
Shaw who wrote "Candida" and the Mr. Shaw who 
wrote "Back to Methusaleh," and I do not believe 
that he would be much, if any different, at the age 
of three hundred or thirty thousand from what he 
now is. Man may develop this or that aspect of 
himself more than another, but essentially he re- 
mains the same. It is not length of years that is 
important to us, but what we do in them. Keats 
and Shelley were young when they died: Tenn)^- 
son was old; but the length of their years seems 
immaterial to their reputation. Mr. Shaw tells us 
that if we will hard enough, we can achieve 
longevity, but, apart from the fact that longevity 
first happens in his play to people who have not 
willed it, but had it thrust upon them, I am puzzled 
to understand how Mr. Shaw expects mankind to 
[233] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

will a State of existence which, portrayed by 
him, is extraordinarily repellent. I do not wish 
to be born at the age of seventeen out of an egg 
so that I may become a He-Ancient and live for 
thousands of years in a state of inactive ratiocina- 
tion. And if a life of thought without action 
does not attract my fancy, how can I be ex- 
pected to aspire to it? I cannot find anything 
in the long lives of Mr. Shaw's characters which 
seems to me likely to excite the desire and 
hope of mankind. The He-Ancients and the She- 
Ancients are morose and sterile, ugly and un- 
sociable, hairless and unhappy, liable to death 
by discouragement, long, lean and hopeless. 
I would rather be scrapped! . . . Nor is there 
any greater virtue in the long-lived than there is 
in us. In "The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman" 
(the fourth act of "Back to Methusaleh" ) where 
mankind is divided into two classes, the long-lived 
and the short-lived, we discover that the long-lived 
spend their three hundred years of existence in 
humbugging the short-lived. . . . Man that is bom 
of woman hath but a short time to live, and is 
full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, 
like a flower: he fleeth as it were a shadow, and 
[234] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

never continueth in one place; but, in spite of his 
misery and the shortness of his life, he gets more 
fun and satisfaction than are likely to be enjoyed 
by man that is born out of an egg. 

IX 

I remember very vividly the first occasion on 
which I saw and heard Mr. Shaw. He was lectur- 
ing on "Some Necessary Repairs to Religion" to 
a religious organization, now defunct, called 
"The Guild of St. Mathew." His lecture was ex- 
traordinarily startling to a young man, fresh from 
Belfast and still influenced by his fathers' faith, 
although in revolt against much of it. When the 
lecture was over, a lady asked him to say what his 
belief was about the Resurrection, and he replied, 
that if she would promise not to tell any one, he 
would say that he did not believe it ever took place. 
And then came one of those strange lapses from 
serious argument which are characteristic of him. 
Another questioner asked him if he believed in the 
Immaculate Conception. "Of course I do," he 
said. "I believe that all conceptions are immacu- 
late!" The questioner was so paralysed by this 

[235] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

reply that she sat down without pointing out to 
him that the Catholic Church believes in the Im- 
maculate Conception on the assumption that all 
conceptions are not immaculate. On many oc- 
casions, Mr. Shaw has brilliantly dodged the point 
in that manner; but they are not occasions that 
need be remembered against him. Ever and al- 
ways he has given his best and hardest thought to 
the service of mankind. He has practiced what 
he preaches, and if we are thrown on the scrap- 
heap, it will not be because Mr. Shaw has failed 
to do his uttermost to help God to realise Himself. 
What a shock it will be to him to find that the 
scrap-heap is a more likeable place than his God's 
heaven! 



He is greatly generous to young men. Like 
most of my contemporaries I have imposed upon 
his good nature very often. I sent "Jane Clegg" 
and "John Ferguson" in manuscript to him and 
asked him if he would read them and tell me what 
his opinion of them might be. Probably a dozen 
or more young men were doing exactly the same 
[236] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

thing with their MSS. He could spend the whole 
of his time reading other men's plays, if he were 
to let his good nature go uncontrolled. But he 
read my plays and wrote long, valuable letters 
of advice about them to me. I hesitate to mention 
this fact lest it should cause an avalanche of MSS. 
to fall upon him, but I am trying to draw his por- 
trait, and unless I mention his generosity to young 
men, the portrait will not be a faithful one. I 
am under personal obligations to him of many 
sorts, and I do not know of any man who so freely 
helps his friends and says so little about it. He 
is now sixty-six years old, but there are no signs 
of age about him other than the fact that his hair 
and his beard, once red, have turned white. He 
still has the mind and eagerness of a young man. 
His walk is as springy and alert as it was when I 
first knew him, as I am sure it has always been. 
When I see him in the street sometimes, tall, lean, 
very tidy and almost foppish in an unusual way, 
walking with great assurance and ease, examining 
now and then his very shapely hands, and gazing 
about him with that queer, quizzical, kindly look 
in his pleasant eyes that is so significant of him, 
I feel that although he is thirty years older than 
[237] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

I am, according to the official records, he is, in 
spirit, thirty years younger. He will never be old. 
If he lives to be a centenarian, he will still be talk- 
ing like a young man; and perhaps it is his ex- 
traordinary youth and vitality, as much as his dis- 
respect for established things, that draws young 
men inevitably to him. His fearless, challenging 
spirit attracted all those who were in revolt against 
stagnant beliefs; and even now, when the multi- 
tude seems to have caught up with him and his 
views are less startling than they were a few years 
ago, he still stimulates the minds of the young 
and the eager and sends them bounding forward. 
"You should so live," he once said, "that when you 
die, God is in your debt!" He bids men and 
women strive to put more into the common pool 
than they take out, and he asserts with something 
like moral fury that any one who is taking more 
from the common pool than he puts in, is cheating 
both God and man. There are querulous persons 
who say that his work will not live. Their fore- 
fathers probably said that Shakespeare's work 
would not live, that Cervantes's work would not live, 
that Fielding's work would not live, that Dickens's 
work would not live; and no doubt they produced 
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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

sound arguments to support their faith. Who 
could have believed that "Don Quixote," a mere 
skit on comtemporary novelettes, would win uni- 
versal favour, or that "Pickwick Papers," mere 
verbiage for a set of pictures drawn by a popular 
artist, would live? Yet these local, topical, and 
very contemporary things will not perish. Mr. 
Shaw has indisputably affected the thoughts and 
lives of thinking men and women on two continents 
for thirty years. He is a very daring fellow who 
asks us to believe that this brilliant, original, force- 
ful mind will not continue to affect the thoughts 
and lives of thinking men and women for genera- 
tions to come. 



[239] 



H. G. WELLS 



There are men, such as Dr. Johnson, who are 
mentally active and physically torpid, and there 
are other men, such as Mr. Jack Johnson, who are 
very alert physically, but not quite so alert in 
their minds. It seldom happens that a man com- 
bines great physical energy with great intellectual 
energy. Such a man is Mr. Bernard Shaw. So 
is Mr. H. G. Wells. I imagine that Mr. Wells is 
more active, both in body and in mind, than Mr. 
Shaw, despite the fact that the latter is the slender 
man of the two and that his tongue works more 
rapidly in conjunction with his brain; for Mr. Shaw 
feels fatigue sooner than Mr. Wells. I doubt 
whether Mr. Wells suffers from fatigue at all or to 
any serious extent. He takes few, if any, holi- 
days, works for many hours every day, plays 
games very assiduously, and is unhappy if he has 
not got some work on hand. He begins to write 
a new book immediately he has completed its 
[240] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

precedessor, having no belief, seemingly, in fallow 
time. When he is not working or playing, he is 
talking. His conversation has a curious resem- 
blance in its shape, if I may use that word, to the 
style of his writing. One listens for the suspended 
sentence, for the dots with v/hich, in his prose, he 
breaks a thought so that the reader may himself 
complete it. Mr. Shaw once told me that he could 
not work at creative writing for more than two 
hours every day, and I suspect that he suffers more 
from physical fatigue than he will admit. Mr. 
Wetis works for considerably more than two hours 
every day (and sometimes during the night) though 
I do not suppose he works for two consecutive 
hours at any time. If you are a guest in his 
house, you will see him engaged in some game, 
tennis or hockey or that wild game of his own in- 
vention, "barn-ball," or perhaps playing demon 
patience; and when you are inclined to imagine 
that he is settling down to a long day of games, 
you discover that he is no longer with the players, 
but back in his study working on a manuscript. 

One expects a certain amount of sluggishness 
in every man, and probably there are days when 
Mr. Wells's mind and body go to sleep or lie about 
[241] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

supine, but I do not believe that any one has ever 
seen him asleep or supine. His mind is so active 
that one can almost see ideas leaping off his 
tongue as he talks, and he has a very remarkable 
capacity for engaging the attention of his auditors 
without making any perceptible effort to do so. 
His conversation, unlike that of Mr. Yeats or Mr. 
George Moore, is unrehearsed conversation. It 
has not the swift brilliance of Mr. Shaw's talk, 
and it goes to its point rather jerkily, but it reaches 
its destination. He is not so easily distracted 
from his course as Mr. Gilbert Chesterton is, or 
perhaps I ought to say that he does not take so long 
to get to his destination. Mr. Chesterton seems to 
me to be falling with great amiability on his sub- 
ject, whereas Mr. Wells is eagerly struggling up 
to it. Mr. Chesterton defers to others with great 
courtesy, but his mind, I imagine, is already made 
up. He listens to a controversialist, not because 
he thinks he is likely to be converted to an oppo- 
site opinion — he is fairly certain that he will not 
be converted — but because he has excellent man- 
ners and an exceptionally kindly character. It 
is hard to believe that any man of merit is with- 
out some malice in his nature, some element of 
[242] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

cattishness, but if there is a man of merit without 
these things then that man is Mr. Chesterton. If 
he could bring himself to throttle the creature he 
most detests, the international financier, the man 
without a country, he would, I am sure, do so en- 
tirely without prejudice. Mr. Wells listens, not 
out of politeness, but in the hope that he will re- 
ceive information, and this hope of his causes him 
to listen very patiently even to bad or inexpert 
talkers. He has the additional merit, rare among 
men of genius, of being an uncommonly good host, 
very punctilious about the comfort and pleasure 
of his guests. He is a sociable man, mingling 
easily with very various people, gregarious where 
Mr. Yeats and Mr. Shaw are solitary, and he is 
instinctively friendly. His hospitality is lavish 
and with something of the Dickensian tradition in 
it. He has none of the chilly aloofness of Mr. 
Yeats nor of the shy constraint of Mr. Shaw nor 
of the nervous coldness of Mr. Galsworthy. Were 
it not for a degree of cruelty in his nature, I should 
say that Mr. Chesterton and he were as near to 
each other in temperament as any two men of 
merit can be. It is this strain of cruelty in him 
which makes him so attractive when he loses his 
[243] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

temper, for he seems only to be witty when he is 
about to hit some one very severely on the head. 
I do not know any man who can lose his temper 
in print with so much effect and so entertainingly 
as Mr. Wells can lose his. He is hardly a witty 
man, as Mr. Shaw and Mr. Yeats and even Mr. 
Gilbert Chesterton are witty men, but he has a 
neat, malicious humour which delights him as much 
as it delights his friends, and is most often dis- 
played when he is attacking some one. 

II 

If a writer wished to create a character who 
would most aptly personify the past thirty years 
of English or of world history, he would have to 
create a character very like Mr. Wells: a question- 
ing, variable, demanding person, with some im- 
patience and testiness of temper, with, at times, a 
fantastic and wayward manner, but always super- 
imposed on these superficialities, an eager and un- 
thwartable desire for a true belief. Mr. Chester- 
ton said of him once that "you lie awake at night 
and hear him grow," and fundamentally that is 
true, in spite of the temptation one has at times to 
[244] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

believe that one lies awake at night and merely 
hears him changing his mind. One could, were 
one silly enough to do so, construct a plausible 
indictment of Mr. Wells of hurriedly accepting a 
belief and as hurriedly rejecting it; but to do so 
would be to charge oneself with a superficial mind. 
Mr. Wells, in his eagerness to discover a reason- 
able and sane society in which the spirit of man 
may grow and develop and achieve, has sometimes 
accepted a theory too swiftly, but his scientific 
mind has come, sooner or later, to the rescue of 
his eager heart and has caused him to reject pro- 
posals which he had previously found acceptable. 
In "First and Last Things" he decides against 
the community of austere aristocrats who won his 
advocacy in "A Modern Utopia." The self-dis- 
regard of the Samurai of Japan had pleased him 
as it must please all who contemplate it, and he 
imagined a state in which the best men would gov- 
ern "the average, sensual men," formulating their 
laws and doctrines from the sanctuary of a sort 
of monastic establishment in which their fleshly 
desires would be chastened and perhaps elimi- 
nated. Mr. Wells, having felt the allure of a se- 
lect company of selfless aristocrats, devoting them- 
[245] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

selves to the good government of less gifted nien, 
soon discovered that good government cannot be 
administered by men who are remote from the 
emotions and desires of the governed and so, with 
characteristic courage, he abandoned his Samurai 
and boldly marched into the company of the crowd. 
Can any one find ground for sneering in such be- 
haviour as that? Are not those who try to find 
solutions to puzzles more likely to be successful 
in their efforts because Mr. Wells has offered one 
solution and then, finding it useless, repudiated it 
and tried another? 

There was a time when he saw hope for the 
world in the establishment of a universal language, 
but I doubt whether he holds to that hope now. 
A common speech does not keep men at peace any 
more than a common purpose does, and, in any 
event, man's incorrigible habit of localizing uni- 
versal things until they cease to be universal tends 
in time to make a common speech an impossible 
possession. The Catholic Church has a common 
speech in the Latin tongue, but an Italian priest 
can preach to an English priest in that language 
and remain incomprehensible. The British and 
the American people have a common speech, but 
[246] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

it has become so permeated with local words that 
very often the two races are unintelligible to each 
other, apart altogether from the difficulty of accent. 
Mr. Wells has plunged into a few bog-holes of 
that sort, but he has always extricated himself from 
them, and less and less, as he develops, does he in- 
sist upon uniformity and machinery, and more 
and more does he insist on diversity and spirit. 
"Let us be Catholi-cs in this great matter," Mr. 
Birrell writes on Browning's poetry, "and bum 
our candles at many shrines. In the pleasant 
realms of poesy, no liveries are worn, no paths 
prescribed; you may wander where you will, stop 
where you like, and worship whom you love. 
Nothing is demanded of you, save this, that in all 
your wanderings and worships, you keep two ob- 
jects steadily in view — two, and two only — truth 
and beauty." It may fairly be said of Mr. Wells 
that in all his "wanderings and worships" he has 
tried to do so. 



Ill 

There is a photograph of Mr. Bernard Shaw 
and Mr. H. G. Wells, taken by an American 
[247] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

photographer, Mr. Alvin Langdon Coburn, in 
which the two men are shown sitting side by side. 
It is the most illuminating interpretation of their 
characters that I have ever seen. Mr. Shaw, with 
something of the look of a prophet, sits beside 
Mr. Wells who has a smile of disbelief on his 
face; Mr. Shaw shows a countenance full of faith, 
while Mr. Wells shows one full of inquiry. Mr. 
Shaw accepts the pose quite naturally, but Mr. 
Wells is deprecating. I felt when I saw that 
photograph in Mr. Wells's study that while Mr. 
Shaw accepted the status of a great man as his 
right, Mr. Wells felt uncomfortable about the pose, 
not because he doubts his right to be regarded as 
a great man, but because he is reluctant to live 
on pedestals. "I'm human just as much as you 
are," he seems to be saying to the photographer, 
and the smile of deprecation on his face means, 
if it means anything, that while Mr. Shaw accepts 
the great man's altitude without a qualm, Mr. 
Wells feels that die whole thing is humbug. 
"Shaw is taken in by this Great Man business," 
the Wells of the photograph says as plainly as if 
the picture were to take life and utter words, "but 
don't you imagine I'm deluded by it! . . ." 
[248] 



i 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

These two men, one Irish, one English, George 
Bernard Shaw and Herbert George Wells, between 
them have done more to influence the minds of 
the young men of my generation than any other 
two men of their time. Their attitude towards 
life may, perhaps, be summarized in an account 
of the way in which they interpret the doctrine 
of Evolution. Mr. Shaw believes that the Life 
Force, which ordinary men call God, is an Im 
perfect Thing seeking to make Itself Perfect 
How, when you contemplate the miseries and in 
equalities and cruelties of existence, can you be 
lieve in an All- Powerful God? he says. You mus 
believe that these horrible things happen because 
God cannot prevent them from happening. The 
blind-alley argument that the Almighty inflicts pain 
upon us for our good is insupportable when one 
considers that an earthly father would not subject 
his child to convulsions or cause a cancer to con- 
sume its life or endow it with a cruel disposition if 
such things were within his powers of disposal. If, 
one reasonably argues, an earthly father is in- 
capable of such acts, how less likely is God to 
be capable of them if He be All-Powerful and All- 
Good? Since these inexplicable cruelties and hor- 
[249] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

rors occur and recur, surely, argues Mr. Shaw, it 
is only common sense to assume that they do so in 
spite of God's good will towards man. Starting 
from this premise, he goes on to argue that God 
seeks to obtain that control over material things 
which He has not yet succeeded in obtaining. He 
imagines God engaged in a magnificent research, 
the discovery of a harmonious universe, much in 
the way in which one imagines a biologist in his 
laboratory seeking for a preventative of disease. 
The Life Force uses such instruments for its pur- 
pose as are to be found lying at hand. When these 
prove abortive or useless or insufficient, the Life 
Force invents a new instrument which it uses until 
that instrument, too, is found to be useless or in- 
adequate and is scrapped in favour of a new instru- 
ment. Like all creators, God must express Him- 
self through His creatures, and the whole of Time 
has been spent so far in finding a suitable means 
of expression. In the beginning, God used mam- 
moth beasts, but finding them unsuitable for His 
purpose. He scrapped them and invented other 
creatures until at last He achieved His best instru- 
ment, Man. God's latest and finest creature differs 
from all His other creatures in this respect that ho 
[250] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

is conscious of God's purpose and can help it for- 
ward or hold it back. God concealed His inten- 
tion from all the instruments that preceded the ad- 
vent of Man, but, in the development of His Be- 
ing, He found that greater advantage would ac- 
crue to Him if He made His instrument aware of 
its purpose. So we get the reason of Man. God, 
before the creation of Man, had depended upon 
Himself. After the creation of Man, he depended 
partly upon Himself, partly upon His creature. 
Man, in short, was the first of God's instruments 
to huve the power to help God to realize Him- 
self. To Mr. Shaw, it is an obscuring of God's 
purpose for Man continually to pray, "God help 
me!" when it is part of his purpose and duty to 
affirm, "I will help God!" I have already quoted 
his dictum that we should so live that when we 
die, God is in our debt. 

It is obvious, from this belief, that Mr. Shaw 
does not believe in the inevitable march of man- 
kind from bad to good and from good to better. 
We may be marching towards Utopia or the New 
Jerusalem, or we may be marching back to Chaos. 
Man, having the choice between helping God and 
thwarting Him, may so vex the Deity that He will 

[251] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

become impatient with him and throw this instru- 
ment away as he has thrown away other useless 
instruments, and seek for a better one. God 
scrapped the mammoth beasts because they were 
not adequate for the execution of His design; He 
may scrap Man for the same reason or because 
Man, while adequate, wilfully refuses to help. 
This theory is expressed continually in Mr. Shaw's 
plays and prefaces, for example, in a speech by 
Caesar in "Caesar and Cleopatra," where the Em- 
peror gives expression to a violent antipathy to 
war. War, in Mr. Shaw's mind, is a plain per- 
version of God's purpose, and he would probably 
declare that Man, in the Great War whose end 
may yet be a bloody battle between the Allies, 
almost reached the end of God's patience. In five 
years, the British alone had eight hundred thou- 
sand of her most valuable men killed, France 
lost double that number killed, Germany lost 
more even than France killed. All the potential- 
ities for good, all the fervour and chivalry and 
idealism and courage that was in those men, their 
ability to help God to achieve perfection, has 
vanished utterly from the world; and there is 
nothing left of it. Most of them died without 
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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

progeny, and so there is not even the hope that 
their spirit has passed on to their children and 
that, at the worst, God's purpose has only been 
suspended for a generation. They have gone, ir- 
retrievably gone. Another such war and Western 
civilization must perish, if, indeed, it has not 
already begun to decay. In other words, God, 
sickened by Man's perversity and wilful obstruc- 
tion, will have scrapped him. . . . 

That is the Shavian doctrine of the Life Force, 
put plainly and simply. 

Mr. Wells differs very sharply from Mr. Shaw 
in his doctrine. Mr. Shaw believes that the pro- 
gress from bad to good is not inevitable: Mr. 
Wells believes that it is, and he produces the rec- 
ords of history to support his belief. Mankind, 
at this moment, he will admit, is in a very bloody 
mess, but that mess is not so frightful as, say, the 
mess after the Thirty Years' War. We, who con- 
template the organized Murder of Youth which be- 
gan in August, 1914, may fairly feel that mankind 
has sunk very low in barbarism, but when we sur- 
vey the whole range of humanity so far as it has 
been recorded, the depths of 1914, deep though 
they are, appear to be slightly less dreadful than 
[253] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

the depths of other days. There is a greater revolt 
from organized Murder to-day than there was 
after the Thirty Years' War. There are fewer peo- 
ple to-day who prate about the glories of war 
than there were then. (Oddly enough, or per- 
haps naturally enough, most of the people who 
still think of war as a jolly adventure live in Amer- 
ica.) We are a little nearer to a realization of 
the commandment, "Thou Shalt Not Kill" than we 
were before 1914. We are learning that there are 
no qualifications or exceptions to that command- 
ment. It does not say, "Thou shalt not kill — ex- 
cept in defence of small nationalities!" It does 
not say, "Thou shalt not kill — except for the pur- 
pose of self-determination!" It does not say, 
"Thou shalt not kill — except for the establishment 
of a Republic in Ireland!" It does not say, "Thou 
shalt not kill — except for the purpose of preserving 
the Empire!" Tersely and without modification, 
it states that "Thou Shalt Not Kill" in any circum- 
stances whatever. 

Here is a dilemma from which the Christian can- 
not easily escape, and the difficulty of doing so, 
apart from all ordinary considerations of decency, 
is bringing man sharply face to face with the fun- 
[254] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

damentals of human existence. In spite of much 
occasion for pessimism to-day, there is occasion 
for greater optimism than man ever before has had. 
There is a social consciousness at work in our 
minds and hearts that will yet deliver us from the 
wicked man. How few are the years since the 
days when men in one part of England made war 
on men in another part! How unthinkable it is 
that men in Lancaster should make war to-day in 
Yorkshire! True, it is less than a century since 
men in the Northern States of America made war 
on men in the Southern States. True, it is less 
than ten years since men in Ulster prepared them- 
selves to make war on men in the rest of Ireland. 
True, at this moment, Russian fights Russian, and 
Sinn Feiner slays Orangeman, and Orangeman 
slays Sinn Feiner. True, that white man burns 
black man, tliat Christian persecutes Jew, true all 
this and worse, yet it remains true that when the 
records of time are made up and just balances are 
drawn in the accounts of Mankind, there is seen 
to be a greater perception of common purpose to- 
day than there was a century ago. 

His scientific and historic sense keeps Mr. Wells 
secure in his belief that Man, although he may 
[255] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

hinder the development of God's purpose, cannot 
thwart it. Mr. Shaw would perhaps agree with 
Mr. Wells in his belief that God's Will must uhi- 
mately find adequate expression, but he would in- 
sist that that expression may be through another 
instrument than man. Mr. Wells, however, would 
not yield to him on this point; he would insist that 
God's Will must ultimately find adequate expres- 
sion through man. Man may, indeed be obliter- 
ated by plague and pestilence or cosmic disaster, 
but, failing those, man must achieve God's pur- 
pose. 

ly 

When one brings the Wellsian doctrine down to 
the details of life, one discovers what I may call 
a local pessimism in it. The anger which breaks 
out of his work is directed against the incom- 
petence and stupidity of man which hold him back 
from the desirable country towards which he is 
marching. The greatest optimists — the men who 
are convinced that man's end is good and seemly — 
are almost always the most bitter pessimists when 
they are considering contemporary affairs. The 
[256] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

visionary loves mankind in the abstract so much 
that when he contemplates mankind in the concrete 
he loses his temper. The Utopian, full of his 
dream of a decent and free civilization in which 
every man may move easily to his proper station, 
feels a dreadful depression when he looks upon 
society as it exists here and now; and there are 
times when, in spite of his sure and certain hope 
that life will ultimately find its level, he feels that 
man, that perverse, wayward, thwarting creature, 
will never fulfil the promise of his potentialities 
because he is too closely concerned with some tiny, 
personal vanity, because he allows wickedness and 
stupidity to influence him to a greater degree than 
goodness and fine thought. Who, thinking over 
the Big Four in Paris, and remembering that mil- 
lions of young men of all nations died so that the 
Big Four might meet and make a more enduring 
peace than this world has yet known, can feel any- 
thing but anger and humiliation at what thisy did? 
Clemenceau, the "Tiger" who, having tasted blood, 
seemed eager to taste more; Lloyd George, who 
never remembers a friend or forgets an enemy; 
Orlando, shamelessly extending his itching palm; 
and Wilson, the man who went to Europe to ask 
[257] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

for the moon and returned to America, having ac- 
cepted a match . . . can any of us, contempla- 
ting those four men, given by God the greatest op- 
portunity that has ever been offered to men, that 
may ever be offered to men, help feeling that this 
world is dead and damned and that the sooner a 
disgusted God smashes it to pieces, the better will 
be the universe? Mr. Wells cannot escape, any 
more than the rest of us, this tendency to despair 
of human effort, and here and there in his books 
his local pessimism is expressed ; but his universal 
optimism remains unimpaired, and one comes 
away from his writings in the knowledge that he 
believes that man sooner or later will achieve a 
high destiny. He whips the stupid and the selfish 
and the idle, but he will not permit them to per- 
suade him from his belief that even out of these 
elements, a finer Man will yet be made. 



There is a cartoon by Mr. Max Beerbohm in 
which he shows himself being conducted through a 
gallery where Mr. Wells, Mr. Shaw, Mr. Gals- 
worthy, Mr. Bennett and many other eminent 
[258] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

writers are standing on inverted tubs, haranguing 
the universe. Having listened to the preachers 
and propagandists, Mr. Beerbohm turns to his 
guide and says, "But where are the artists?" only 
to be informed that ''These are the artists!" It 
has been said that Mr. Shaw would rather be known 
as a great political economist than as a great dram- 
atist, that Mr. Arnold Bennett would rather be 
known as an eminent business man than as an em- 
inent novelist, that Mr. Galsworthy would prefer to 
be a reformer than a man of letters, and that Mr. 
Wells seeks fame as a sociologist and not as an 
artist. There is enough truth in this statement to 
give pause to those about whom it is made, but not 
sufficient to frighten us who admire them. Mr. 
Wells, for example, can no more elude artistry than 
he can refrain from thinking. He is extraordina- 
rily indifferent to literary style, seems almost to de- 
light in making a clumsy sentence rather than a 
shapely one, and, so far as one can discover, does 
not spend a single second on "finding the right 
word." The idea is his chief concern, and he cares 
very little for the way in which it is expressed. 
Nevertheless, he remains an artist, with a gift for 
apt expressions and a far greater gift for 
[259] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

selection. In one of his books, he describes the 
prostitute as "that painted disaster of the street." 
In "First and Last Things," in describing the ina- 
bility of the intellect to free itself from bias, he 
says, "the forceps of the mind is a clumsy instru- 
ment and crushes the truth a little in seizing it." 
At the end of "Tono-Bungay" there is an account of 
a trip down the Thames which is among the great 
pieces of prose writing. In "The Undying Fire," 
he gives an account of the purposeless cruelty of 
Nature and an account of the state of mind of a 
young German who goes from his remote village to 
join the Army at the beginning of the war, full of 
patriotic ardour, offering for this service and for 
that until at last he becomes a member of the crew 
of a submarine and his patriotism suffers a sea- 
change and becomes the desperate courage of a 
rat in a trap . . . and these two accounts are so 
vivid that it is impossible for any one to rise from 
them unaware that they have been written by a man 
of genius, possessed of artistry. 

He is probably the most prolific writer of his 
quality in the world, and if I had exact knowledge 
of the world's greatest authors, I should probably 
[260] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

say that he is the most varied of them. Consider 
how very dissimilar his books are in range and 
interest. Consider that the man who wrote "The 
Time Machine," wrote also "The History of Mr. 
Polly" and the "The Undying Fire." How many 
writers have shown such variety as has been shown 
by the author of "The War in the Air," "Kipps" 
(that beautiful and tender book), "Tono-Bungay" 
and "The Soul of a Bishop." At one moment, 
Mr. Wells is writing "Bealby" and at the next, he 
is writing "God, the Invisible King." He turns 
from "The Wonderful Visit" to "The Outline His- 
tory of the World," and writes "The Future in 
America" in the trail of "Love and Mr. Lewisham." 
("The Future in America" is perhaps the best 
book of its kind that has ever been written on the 
problems that lie before the American people.) 
Queen Victoria, having been enchanted by "Alice 
in Wonderland," sent to a book-seller for the re- 
mainder of "Lewis Carroll's" writings, and was 
considerably disconcerted when she received 
"Plane Trigonometry" and "Curiosa Mathemat- 
ica" by the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. 
What that excellent old lady would have thought, 
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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

if having read and liked "The Sea Lady," she had 
been supplied with "Mankind in the Making" and 
"The Island of Dr. Moreau" and "Joan and Peter" 
by the same author, I cannot imagine. Mr. Wells 
faces life very fairly and squarely, regarding it 
from all angles of vision. There is only one 
Truth, but it may be approached by many different 
paths; and Mr. Wells has attempted most of them. 
It may seem to some of his readers at times that 
he is running away from things towards which he 
formerly ran, but it is more likely that he is merely 
trying another way of getting to the same point. 

VI 

One remembers men by odd things. I remem- 
ber Mr. Yeats chiefly as a dark image, obscurely 
seen, and Mr. Shaw as a shy, erect man with fine, 
shapely hands, who talks emphatically because 
otherwise he would not be talking at all. I remem- 
ber Mr. Galsworthy as one who is biting his lips 
or clenching his teeth lest he should say too much, 
and Mr. George Moore as one who is consumed 
with the fear that he will not say enough. Mr. 
Wells comes into my mind as an eager, friendly 
[262] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

man, whose speech, thinly uttered, suggests contin- 
ual testing. But mostly I remember his fine eyes 
because it is in them that most of his strength is 
stored. 



[263] 



WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 

I 

I HAVE been acquainted with Mr. Yeats for a 
longer time than I have with any other man named 
in this book, but I seem to myself to know very little 
about him, for he is extraordinarily aloof from life. 
His aloofness is different from that of Mr. Gals- 
worthy who is perturbed about mankind. Mr. 
Yeats is totally unconcerned about problems of 
any sort. He is more interested in the things men 
do than in men themselves. He prefers the symbol 
to the thing symbolized. The harshest condem- 
nation I ever heard him utter was delivered on 
"A. E." of whom he said that he had ceased to be 
a poet in order to become a philanthropist! I met 
him last in Chicago, and I felt when we parted that 
I knew no more of him then than I knew when I 
first met him ten years earlier. Our meeting fol- 
lowed on the fact that I had sent a one-act play, 
entitled "The Magnanimous Lover," to him. It 
seems to me now to be a crudely-contrived, ill-writ- 
[264] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

ten and violent piece, but when I sent it to Mr. 
Yeats I thought it was a remarkable work. It was 
performed after the production of Stanley Hough- 
ton's "Hindle Wakes" and Mr. Galsworthy's "The 
Eldest Son," which have similar themes, but was 
written several years before they were performed. 
One evening, a few weeks after I had sent the manu- 
script of "The Magnanimous Lover" to him, I re- 
ceived a letter from Mr. Yeats, written in that 
queer, illegible, thick style which is so difficult to 
read. Many of the words were incomplete: all of 
them were badly-formed. The contrast between 
the handwriting of Mr. Shaw and Mr. Yeats is re- 
markable. Mr. Shaw's is very clear and neat and 
most beautifully-shaped, as delicate as a spider's 
web, but Mr. Yeats's writing is obscure, untidy, 
sprawling and hard to decipher, looking as if it 
had been done with a blunt pen. Mr. Wells writes 
in a small, clean, but not very clear hand, a decep- 
tive fist, for it seems easier to read than it is. 
There is some oddness in the fact that the hand- 
writing of the poet should be so coarse and un- 
gainly, while the handwriting of the dramatist, with 
so little of poetic emotion in him, is fine and 
shapely. The letter from Mr. Yeats was to say 
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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

that he liked my play, but could not make a definite 
decision about it until he had consulted his co-di- 
rector at the Abbey Theatre, Lady Gregory. It 
had the formal, distant tone which is characteristic 
of his speech and writing, but it had a postscript 
which gave me great pleasure. In this postscript, 
he said that my play was the only example of "way- 
ward realism" that he had ever read. I did not 
quite understand what he meant by the phrase, but 
it was a compliment from a distinguished man and 
compliments from distinguished men had never 
come my way before. I have had many praising 
letters from him since then about my work, but 
none that ever raised me to such a state of dizzy de- 
light as that first letter did. He told me, in an- 
other postscript, that he found in my "dialogue a 
quality of temperament, as distinguished from the 
usual impersonal logic. You have more than con- 
struction, and it is growing rare to have more." 
He thought highly of "John Ferguson" — so did 
Mr. Shaw and "A. E." — and when I was attacked 
in Dublin because of this play, I comforted myself 
with the thought that my betters liked what was 
denounced by my inferiors. Mr. Yeats wrote to 
[266] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

me that "John Ferguson" was "a fragment of life, 
fully expounded and without conventionality or 
confusion. I think it is the best play you have 
done, though not likely to be the most popular." 
His criticism is especially valuable when it is ad- 
verse. I had written a play called "Mrs. Martin's 
Man" which I now know to have been a dreadful 
mess of motives. I sent it to Mr. Yeats in the 
hope that he would permit it to be done at the 
Abbey. He wrote lengthily to me about it, and 
when I had read his letter I put my play in the 
fire, though afterwards I used the theme, purged 
of the faults he had found in it, for a novel with 
the same title. "I believe," he wrote, 

"I believe that the play is an error. I am very sorry 
indeed to say this, for I know what a blow it is to any 
dramatist to be told that about work which must have 
taken many weeks. Shaw has driven you off your 
balance, and instead of giving a vision of life, which is 
your gift and a most remarkable gift to have, you have 
begun to be topical, to play with ideas, to construct out- 
side of life. Shaw has a very unique mind, a mind that 
is a part of a logical process going on all over Europe 
but which has found in him alone its efficient expression 
in English. He has no vision of life. He is a figure of 
international argument. There is an old saying, "No 
[267] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

angel can carry two messages. Yjou have the greater 
gift of seeing life itself. ..." 

I print that extract from his letter, partly as 
a corrective to my own pride, but chiefly because 
of its commentary on Mr. Shaw. Later, in this 
chapter I will make specific reference to Mr. 
Yeats's relationship to Mr. Shaw's work, but here 
I may say that, in spite of his sincere regard and 
admiration for Mr. Shaw, Mr. Yeats seems to be 
totally incapable of comprehending his work. He 
is able to communicate with ghosts, but he cannot 
communicate with Mr. Shaw. He can understand 
astrologers and necromancers and spiritualists and 
thimble-riggers of all sorts and conditions, but he 
cannot understand Mr. Shaw. He told me on one 
occasion of an experience he had with a medium, 
a young girl who diff*ered from all other mediums 
known to him in being a member of the upper class. 
The spirits, seemingly, prefer to communicate their 
messages through the lower orders. This girl's 
family were ashamed of her cataleptic powers and 
tried to conceal them from their neghbours, but 
they were persuaded to permit Mr. Yeats to see her 
in a trance. "While she was in the trance," he 
said to me, "her fingers closed on her palm. Then 
[268] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

they opened again, and I saw a small green pebble 
in the centre of her palm!" That was all! Im- 
mortal souls had disturbed the harmony of the uni- 
verse and thrown a young girl of the upper class 
into a trance in order that they might place a 
small green pebble in the centre of her palm! 
And Mr. Yeats saw something wonderful and 
significant in that performance, but is unable to 
see anything significant in the work of Mr. Shaw. 
That to me is a thing so incomprehensible that I 
have abandoned all attempts to understand it. But 
all of this is digression and anticipation. Soon 
after I had received the letter in which he praised 
my "wayward realism," I heard from Mr. Yeats 
again. He invited me to call on him on the follow- 
ing Sunday evening at his rooms in Woburn 
Buildings, behind the Euston Road, in London; and 
thither, in a state of some excitement, I repaired. 
I had no trouble in finding the house, for Mr. 
Yeats, who, in some ways, is much more precise 
and clear-minded than people imagine or his hand- 
writing indicates, had given me very explicit di- 
rections how to get to it, and had even drawn a 
rough sketch of the neighbourhood so that I should 
not fail to find him. Woburn Buildings consists 
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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

of a number of tall houses in a narrow passage off 
Southampton Row, and running parallel with the 
Euston Road. It is a dingy, dark place, with an 
air of furtive poverty about it, and on Sunday 
nights it is depressing enough to fill a man's mind 
with plots for drab dramas. I have heard that 
H. G. Wells thought of the plot of that clever, devil- 
ish story of his, "The Island of Dr. Moreau," in the 
Tottenham Court Road on a Bank Holiday when 
he was in a mood of discontent. I believe that 
the whole of the "drab drama" was first conceived 
on Mr. Yeats's doorstep! 

Shops form the ground floor of these houses, 
little, huckstering shops that just contrive to sup- 
port their proprietors, and Mr. Yeats's rooms were 
on the third and fourth floors of a house which had 
a cobbler's shop on the ground floor. The cob- 
bler was a pleasant, bearded man, wearing spec- 
tacles who had some share in the management of 
his affairs; for when one, unable to obtain admis- 
sion to the poet's rooms, required information 
about him, the cobbler invariably supplied it. He 
could tell whether Mr. Yeats had gone to Ire- 
land or was merely taking the air, and when he 
was likely to return, and he would off'er, with great 
[270] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

courtesy, to take a message from you to be faith- 
fully delivered to him on his arrival. 

Mr. Yeats has poor and failing sight, and in the 
dusk of the Sunday evening on which I called on 
him, he could barely discern me. He stood in 
the hall, holding the door, looking very tall and 
dark, and said in that peculiar, tired and plaintive 
voice of his, "Who is it?" and I answered "St. John 
Ervine." There is always something conspira- 
torial about the manner in which he admits you 
to his rooms. You felt that you want to give the 
countersign. 

"Oh, yes!" he said, without any interest, and 
bade me enter. 

In one of his books, he writes that life seems to 
him to be a preparation for something that never 
happens ; and the quality of his voice suggests that 
thwarted desire which is expressed in so much of 
his work. He is, in poetry, what Mr. Galsworthy 
is, in fiction: he surrenders to life. I do not 
know of any one who can speak verse so beautifully 
and yet so depressingly as he can. The very 
great beauty that is in all his work does not stir 
you: it saddens you. There is no sunrise in his 
writing: there is only sunset. In his lyrics, there 
[271] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

is the cadence of fatigue and of the lethargy that 
comes partly from disappointment, partly from 
loneliness, partly from doubt, and partly from in- 
^ertia. "Innisfree," the beauty of which has not 
been diminished by familiarity, does not sound 
glad: it sounds tired. The poet's wish to return 
to the lake island is not due to any pleasurable 
emotion, but to weariness and exhaustion: he 
dreams of the island, not as a place in which to 
work and to achieve, but in which to retire from 
work and achievement that has not brought with it 
the gratification for which he hoped; and the final 
impression left on the mind of the reader is that 
the poet is too tired and disappointed to do more 
than wish that he might go to Innisfree. One reads 
the beautiful poem in the sure and certain belief 
that Mr. Yeats will not "arise and go now, and go 
to Innisfree," but that he will remain where 
he is. There is no impulse or movement in the 
poem: there is only a passive wish and a plaintive 
resignation. 

And all that inertia and negation and inactive 
desire is sounded in his voice. It is very palpable 
in his manner. 

He warned me not to make a noise as I ascended 
[272] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

the uncarpeted stairs: the people on the second 
floor might be disturbed. They were working- 
people, I understood, and either there was a fret' 
ful baby asleep or the people retired early because 
they had to rise early, and he did not wish to 
break their rest. Yeats can be very harsh and 
inconsiderate with his associates, but his bearing 
to poor men and women, in my experience, is very 
courteous and very considerate. He could not 
have been more gracious to a duchess — he probably 
was sometimes less gracious to a duchess — than he 
was to the middle-aged woman who cooked his 
meals and kept his rooms clean. I have seen 
distinguished men being gracious to poor, unlet- 
tered men, but most of them had an air of . . . 
not exactly condescension in doing so, but of alter- 
ing their attitude slightly, of relaxing and unbend- 
ing, of modifying their style, as it were, and mak- 
ing it simpler. I did not observe any effort at 
condescension in his manner towards that plain 
and simple woman. He spoke to her in the same 
way that he would speak to "A. E." or to Lady 
Gregory. I suppose that Queen Victoria was the 
only woman in the world to whom Yeats ever spoke 
in a condescending fashion. 
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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 



II 



He is a tall man, with dark hanging hair that is 
now turning grey, and he has a queer way of focus- 
sing when he looks at you. I do not know what 
is the defect of sight from which he suffers, but 
it makes his way of regarding you somewhat dis- 
turbing. He has a poetic appearance, entirely 
physical, and owing nothing to any eccentricity of 
dress ; for, apart from his neck-tie, there is nothing 
odd about his clothes. It is not easy to talk to 
him in a familiar fashion, and I imagine that he 
has difficulty in talking easily on common topics. 
I soon discovered that he is not comfortable with 
individuals: he needs an audience to which he can 
discourse in a pontifical manner. If he is com- 
pelled to remain in the company of one person for 
any length of time, he begins to pretend that the 
individual is a crowd listening to him. His talk is 
seldom about common-place things: it is either in a 
high and brilliant style or else it is full of rem- 
iniscences of dead friends. I do not believe that 
any one in this world has ever spoken familiarly 
to him or that any one has ever slapped him on the 
back and said "Helloa, old chap!" His relatives 
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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

and near friends call him "Willie" but it has al- 
ways seemed to me that they do so with an effort, 
that they feel that they ought to call him "Mr. 
Yeats!" I doubt very much whether he takes any 
intimate interest in any human being. It may be, 
of course, that he took less interest in me than he 
took in any one else for I am not a very interesting 
person ; but I always felt that when I left his pres- 
ence, it was immaterial to him whether he ever saw 
me again or not. I felt that, on my hundredth 
meeting with him, I should be no nearer intimacy 
with him than I was on my first meeting. My van- 
ity has since been soothed by the knowledge that 
he has given a similar impression regarding them- 
selves to other people who know him better than I 
do. I have seen him come suddenly into the pres- 
ence of a man whom he had known for many years, 
and greet him awkwardly as if he did not know 
what to say. He never offers his hand to a friend: 
he will often stand looking at one without speaking, 
and then bow and pass on, with perhaps a fumbled 
"Good evening!" but never with a "How are you?" 
or "Fm glad to see you!" 

It is, I suppose, the result of some natural clum- 
siness of manner. He has trained himself to an 
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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

elegance of demeanour, an elaborate courteous- 
ness, which is very pleasing to a stranger, but he 
has spent so much time in achieving this elegance 
that he has forgotten or never learned how to greet 
a friend. 

He was expecting other people to come to his 
rooms that Sunday evening. ... I remember he 
mentioned that Madame Maud Gonne McBride was 
expected to arrive in London from Paris on her 
way to Ireland, and might call on her way to 
Euston Station . . . but no one else came. He 
talked to me about my play and told me that he 
liked it very much, but that Lady Gregory did not 
greatly care for it. "She is a realist herself," he 
said, "and all realists hate each other. Synge 
would have disliked your play, and Robinson does 
not like it, but I do!" (Lennox Robinson, himself 
a dramatist, was then manager of the Abbey The- 
atre.) He asked me if I had written any other 
plays, and I told him that I was half-way through 
a four-act play, called "Mixed Marriage," and I 
described the theme of it to him. He urged me 
to complete this play and bring the MS. to his 
rooms and read it to him. "The difficulty about 
'The Magnanimous Lover,' " he said, "is that it 
[276] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

may provoke some disturbance among the au- 
dience, and as our patent expires shortly we do 
not wish to give the authorities any ground for 
refusing to renew it. They were very angry over 
our production of Bernard Shaw's 'Blanco Posnet' 
after the Censor refused to license it in England. 
We'll leave the production of 'The Magnanimous 
Lover' until the patent has been renewed. If your 
new play were ready, we could do it first and 
create a public for you! ..." 

Mr. Yeats is one of the best advertising agents 
in the world, and I did not doubt his ability to 
"create a public" for me, although I thought that 
Lady Gregory would probably be more skilful 
even that he could be. When one remembers that 
she has established a considerable reputation as a 
dramatist on two continents entirely on the strength 
of half-a-dozen one-act plays, it is impossible to 
doubt that she is at least as skilful as he in draw- 
ing attention to herself. A great amount of their 
advertising energy has, of course, been expended 
on the Abbey Theatre and the Irish Literary Ren- 
aissance, and a great many Irish writers, myself 
included, have derived advantage, personal and 
pecuniary, from their activities. It would have 
[277] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

been better for us, perhaps, if Mr. Yeats had em- 
ployed his critical ability more freely than his 
eulogy on our work. There is an immense 
amount of creative power in Ireland, but it is raw, 
untutored, tumid stuff, and because the critical fac- 
ulty in Ireland is almost negligible, this creative 
power is wasted in violent explosive plays and 
books or violent, explosive beliefs. 

I have always believed in the interdependence 
of all men and minds. It seems to me that an ill- 
conceived, foolish political scheme must in some 
manner react on every other department of man's 
life, and that the labourer who is doing his job 
badly in a remote village is in some measure ad- 
versely affecting the welfare of his countrymen 
miles away. Violent, crude plays are inevitable 
in a land of violent, crude beliefs; and it is, I 
think, not without significance that some of the most 
violent, crude plays in the Abbey repertory were 
written by dramatists who professed the violent, 
crude beliefs of Sinn Fein. When one thinks of 
the generosity and courage and nobility of many 
of the Sinn Feiners, it is hard not to lose faith in 
human perfectibility when one considers how fool- 
ish are the political schemes they devise. If men 
[278] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

SO good and exalted as these men are can produce 
schemes so stupid and sometimes so cruel, how can 
we hope for any progress in the world when we 
remember how many bad men there are? And 
have we not seen how men of lofty ideals can 
tumble into cruelty and become brutal ruffians in 
the name of patriotism? 



Ill 



But there is an explanation of all this crudity 
and violence in Ireland. For all sorts of reasons, 
political, social, historical and religious, the criti- 
cal faculty has rarely been employed and certainly 
has not been developed. Either you are for a 
thing or you are against it. Doubt is treated as 
if it were antagonism. Reluctance to commit one- 
self to any scheme however fantastic or ill-con- 
sidered it may be, is treated as treason to the na- 
tional spirit. A man who asserts his belief in the 
establishment of an Irish Republic, by force, if 
necessary, is an Irishman, even though he be a 
"dago," and any one who is doubtful of the feas- 
ibility of this proposal is denounced as a West 
Briton, an anglicised Irishman, even, on occasions, 
[279] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

as "not Irish at all," although his forbears have 
lived in Ireland for generations. The state of af- 
fairs in Ireland is not unlike the state of affairs in 
Russia, where literary criticism, as a Russian 
writer has stated, has always tended to be the 
handmaid of political faction. "Any writer of 
sufficient talent" says a reviewer in the Times 
Literary Supplement, "who adopted a liberal at- 
titude was certain of the appreciation of the in* 
telligentsia s acknowledged critical leaders, and 
hence of a wide and enthusiastic audience. But 
writers whose instinct for the truth led them to 
doubt the sufficiency of doctrinaire discontent with 
the established order were debarred from the aids 
to literary advancement, and had to struggle 
against the grain of popular, and even academic, 
valuation." 

It is even worse than that in Ireland, for there, 
generally speaking, there is hardly any criticism 
at all, although there is plenty of abuse. In great 
measure this lack of criticism is due to the fact 
that all the mind of Ireland has been obsessed by 
the demand for, or the opposition to, self-govern- 
ment. There has not been any reality in Irish 
electoral contests for a great many years. Until 
[280] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

the growth of Sinn Fein, there seldom were any 
contests at all. Candidates for parliament were 
nearly always returned unopposed. Contests, if 
there were any, were between one Nationalist and 
another, concerned with matters of detail and not 
with matters of principle, or, at the most, between 
a Nationalist and a Unionist, concerned with the 
advocacy of, or opposition to. Home Rule. Sinn 
Fein has, indeed, brought a contest to every con- 
stituency, but even here the contest is concerned 
with the old obsession, self-government in one form 
or self-government in another: Home Rule within 
the British Commonwealth or a Republic outside 
it. If one considers that this obsession was nearly 
always expressed in bitter language, it is not dif- 
ficult to understand how deplorable its effects have 
been on the general life of the Irish people. It 
has temporarily incapacitated them from judging 
any proposition in a sane and dispassionate fash- 
ion; and so the critical faculty in Ireland has 
languished until at times one fears that it has de- 
cayed. 

Mr. Yeats is a great creative artist: he is also 
a great critic. Had he chosen to do so, he could 
have had an enormous influence on the minds of 
[281] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

his countrymen. His pride in his craft, his de- 
sire for perfect work, his contempt for subterfuges 
and makeshifts and ill-considered schemes, his 
knowledge and his skill, all these would have af- 
fected the faith and achievements of his country- 
men, imperceptibly, perhaps, but very surely. It 
is unfortunate that he was not appointed to the 
Chair of Literature in Trinity College, Dublin. I 
know that he wished to receive this appointment 
and was disappointed that he did not receive it. 
The mind that might have disciplined and devel- 
oped the imagination of young Irishmen was re- 
jected by Trinity College, and it has turned to tire- 
some preoccupation with disembodied beings, to 
table-turning and ouija-boards and the childish 
investigation of what is called spiritual phenom- 
ena, but is, in fact, mere conjurer's stuff. 

IV 

I saw Mr. Yeats many times after that first visit. 
He told me that he was always at home to his 
friends on Monday evening, and he invited me to 
dine with him on the Monday immediately follow- 
ing the Sunday on which I first met him. No one 
came on that evening. He talked about acting 
[282] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

and the theatre, and I said something that pleased 
him, and he complimented me in his grave, courte- 
ous manner. "That was well said," he exclaimed, 
and I flushed with pleasure. The praise of one 
distinguished man is more than the applause of 
a multitude of common men. His talk about the 
theatre, though interesting, was often remote from 
reality. He was then interested in the more 
esoteric forms of drama, and was eager to put 
masks on the actors' faces. He wished to elimin- 
ate the personality of the player from the play, 
and had borrowed some foolish notions from Mr. 
Gordon Craig about lighting and scenery and de- 
humanised actors. He had a model of the Abbey 
Theatre in his rooms and was fond of experiment- 
ing with it. There was some inconsistency in his 
talk about acting: at one moment he was anxious 
for anonymous, masked players, "freed" from 
personality, and at the next moment, he was de- 
manding that players should act with their entire 
bodies, not merely with their voices and faces. 
Hazlitt, advocates anonymity on the stage, and 
when one considers how excessive is the regard 
paid to-day to the actor in comparison with that 
paid to the play, one is tempted to support Haz- 
[283] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

litt's demand; but I have never understood why 
one should decline to exploit a personality that is 
rare. 

There is a school of thinkers which holds that 
the best theatre is that one in which a player may 
be the hero of the piece to-night and the "voice 
off" to-morrow night. This is a ridiculous theory. 
Even if it were practicable, which it is not, it would 
be a disgraceful waste of material. The manager 
who consented to a proposal that Madame Sarah 
Bernhardt should play the part of the servant with 
one line to say would be an ass and a wastrel. 
It is, perhaps, unfair to treat a man's "table-talk" 
as if it were a serious proposal, and I once got 
into trouble with Mr. Gordon Craig for doing this; 
but so much of Mr. Yeats's talk and writing is re- 
lated to this matter of disembodiment and passion- 
less action, that it is difficult not to treat it seri- 
ously. For my part, I have always been unable 
to understand how it is possible for a human 
being to behave as if he were not a human being. 

Most of the talking was done by Mr. Yeats, and 

he talked extraordinarily well. He is one of the 

best talkers I have ever listened to, in spite of 

the fact that his conversation tends to become a 

[284] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

monologue. But if you cannot talk well your- 
self, you are wise to listen to a man who can. He 
spoke at length about the men who had been his 
friends when he was a young man : of Oscar Wilde 
and Aubrey Beardsley and Arthur Symons and 
Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson ; of Henley and 
Whistler and Mr. Bernard Shaw and of a host of 
others. He had a puzzled, bewildered admira- 
tion for "that strange man of genius, Bernard 
Shaw," but I never felt that he understood Mr. 
Shaw or was happy with Mr. Shaw's mind. He 
could not make head or tail of "John Bull's Other 
Island" when he read it in MS. Mr. Shaw, in a 
debate with Mr. Belloc, which I had heard a night 
or two before the meeting with Mr. Yeats, had 
said "I am a servant," and this statement pleased 
Mr. Yeats very much. He was moved by the hu- 
mility of it. Mr. Shaw, however, hardly entered 
into Mr. Yeats's early life, and most of the talk that 
evening was about Beardsley and Wilde and Lionel 
Johnson and Ernest Dowson and the members of 
the Rhymers' Club. "Most of them," he said, 
"died of drink or went out of their minds!" 

It was late when I prepared to leave him. He 
had been saying that a man should always associate 
[285] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

with his equals and superiors and never with 
his inferiors, when I recollected that the hour 
was late and that I might miss the last tram from 
the Thames Embankment and so have to walk 
several miles. I was tired, too, and a little de- 
pressed, for he seemed to be a lonely man and an 
uneasy man. He had survived all his friends, 
but had not succeeded in making any intimacy with 
their successors. I sometimes feel about him that 
he is a lost man wandering around looking for 
his period. When I had announced that I was 
going home, he astonished me by saying that he 
would walk part of the way with me. He had 
not had any exercise all day and felt that he needed 
some air and movement. (He hates open windows 
and always keeps his tightly closed.) We walked 
to the Embankment together, saying little, for 
silence had fallen on him, and walked along it 
for a short while. I said some banal thing about 
Waterloo Bridge, but he did not make any answer; 
and I did not speak again, but contented myself 
with observing the difference between his walk 
when he is moving slowly and his walk when he 
is moving quickly. He is very dignified in his 
movements when he walks slowly: he holds his 
[286] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

head erect and carries his hands tightly clenched 
behind his back; but when he begins to move 
quickly, the dignity disappears and his walk be- 
comes a tumbling shuffle. That, I suppose, is be- 
cause of his poor sight. 

My tram came along, and I said "Good-night" 
to him, and he answered "Good-night" in a vague 
fashion. I think he had completely forgotten me. 



He had told me that he was going on the fol- 
lowing day to Manchester to lecture to some society'' 
there, and I was sufficiently interested in his opin- 
ions to get a copy of the "Manchester Guardian" 
containing a report of what he had said. I was 
amused to find that his lecture was a repetition 
of all that he had said to me on the Monday before 
the day on which he lectured. He had "tried it 
on the dog," and I was the dog. All his speeches 
are carefully rehearsed before they are publicly 
delivered. He told me once that Oscar Wilde 
rehearsed his conversation in the morning and 
then, being word-perfect, went forth in the evening 
to speak it. I imagine that he does that, too, on 
[287] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

occasions. It is a laudable thing to do in many 
respects, although it tends to make talk somewhat 
formal and liable to be scattered by an interrup- 
tion. When Mr. Yeats rehearses a speech before 
making it in public, he is paying a great tribute 
to his audience by declining to offer them scamped 
or hastily-contrived opinions. Those who listen 
to him may be deceived into believing that he is 
speaking spontaneously, but they may be certain 
that what he says has been carefully considered, 
that he is speaking of things over which he has 
pondered and not just "saying the first thing that 
comes into his head." 

Most men of letters do something of this sort. 
I have listened to Mr. Moore saying things which 
I subsequently read in the preface to the revised 
version of one of his novels; and I remember 
meeting "A. E." in Nassau Street, Dublin, one 
evening and being told a great deal about co-opera- 
tion which I read in his paper, "The Irish Home- 
stead" on the following morning. 

I saw Mr. Yeats many times after that. I com- 
pleted the MS. of "Mixed Marriage" and, much 
embarrassed, read it to him in his rooms. I read 
it very badly, too, and I am sure I bored him a 
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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

great deal; but he was kind and patient and he 
made some useful suggestions to me which I did 
not accept. I had too much conceit, as all young 
writers have, to be guided by a better man than 
myself. I know now that I should have done 
well to take his advice. He warned me against 
topical things and against politics and urged me 
to flee journalism as I would flee the devil; and he 
advised me to read Balzac. He was always ad- 
vising me to read Balzac, but I never did. 



L. • • 



VI 

My memories of those days when I first knew 
him begin to be disconnected, and I find myself 
putting down things which happened after other 
things which I have still to relate; but I have 
never found a consecutive narrative very interest- 
ing, which, perhaps, is why I cannot read Pepys' 
Diary or Evelyn's Diary. I like to take things 
out of their turn, to go forward to one thing and 
then back to an earlier thing. I can only connect 
one incident or memory with another by taking 
them out of their order and doing violence to the 
natural sequence of things. Life is not so inter- 
[289] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

esting when all the factors between 1 and 100 are 
in sequence as it is when 26 and 60 are taken out 
of their place and put into coherence, temporary 
or permanent, with each other. 

He said to me one evening that a man does not 
make firm friendships after the age of twenty-five. 
There is a good deal of truth in that statement, 
but I doubt whether it is generally true. It is 
true of him, for his mind turns back continually 
to the men who were his contemporaries twenty- 
five years ago, but it was not true of Dr. Johnson, 
who shed his friends as he grew in stature of mind. 
And perhaps what Dr. Johnson said to Sir Joshua 
Reynolds is more generally true than what Mr. 
Yeats said to me. "If a man does not make new 
acquaintances as he advances through life, he will 
soon find himself alone. A man, Sir, should keep 
his friendship in constant repair." I do not think 
that anything is so remarkable about Mr. Yeats as 
his aloofness from the life of these times. He has 
very little knowledge of contemporary writing. I 
doubt whether he has read much or even anything 
by Mr. H. G. Wells or Mr. Arnold Bennett or Mr. 
John Galsworthy or Mr. Joseph Conrad. He said 
to me one night that after thirty a man ought to 
[290] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

read only a few books and read them continually. 
Some one had said this to him — I have forgotten 
who said it — and he passed on the advice to me; 
but he added, after a while, that "perhaps the age 
of thirty is too young," and suggested that the age 
should be raised to forty. It seemed very wrong 
advice to me. 

An active mind will surely keep itself ac- 
quainted with new books and familiar with old 
books. I have heard many men, particularly 
schoolmasters and classical scholars, say with 
pride that they never read modern books. Such 
people boast that when a new book is published, 
they read an old one. They are, in my experience, 
dull people, sluggardly in mind, and pompous and 
set in manner. In many cases, particularly if 
they are schoolmasters, they neither read new 
books nor old ones. Dr. Johnson and his friends, 
however, appear to have been familiar with all 
the current literature of their time : history, fiction, 
poetry, drama, philosophy and theology; as well 
as with the ancient writings. They would not have 
boasted of their ignorance of the work of their 
contemporaries. In Mr. Yeats's case, however, 
this unfamiliarity with the work of men writing 
[291] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

to-day is explainable when one remembers that 
he cannot read easily because of his sight. When 
I first knew him, a friend came several times a 
week to read to him out of a copy of the Kelmscott 
Press edition to William Morris's "Earthly Para- 
dise." 

He had, like most young men of his time, been 
much influenced by William Morris, the only man 
for whom I ever heard him profess anything like 
aff'ection, but I remember hearing him say once 
that he no longer got pleasure from reading or 
listening to Morris's poetry. 



VII 



One night, I was at his rooms when Mr. G. M. 
Trevelyan, the historian and biographer of Gari- 
baldi and John Bright, was present with his wife, 
a daughter of Mrs. Humphry Ward. Mr. Yeats 
talked much and well, and I remember his story 
of a dream he had had. He often told stories of 
his dreams, but some of them smelt of the mid- 
night oil. A friend of his, he said, was contem- 
plating submission to the Catholic Church. He 
had tried to dissuade her from this, but she went 
[292] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

away to another country in a state of irresolution. 
One night, he dreamt that he saw her entering 
a room full of beautiful people. She walked 
around the room, looking at these beautiful people 
who smiled and smiled and smiled, but said noth- 
ing. "And suddenly, in my dream," he said, 
"I realized that they were all dead!" "I woke 
up," he proceeded, "and I said to myself, 'She has 
joined the Catholic Church,' and she had." Mr. 
Trevelyan thought that the description of the Catho- 
lic Church as a room full of beautiful people, all 
smiling and all dead, was the most apt he had ever 
heard. He chuckled with contented anti-clerical- 
ism. Another night, when I was in his rooms, Miss 
Ellen Terry's son, Mr. Gordon Craig, came to see 
him; and a model of the Abbey Theatre was 
brought down from his bedroom to the candle-lit 
sitting room, where Mr. Craig experimented with 
lighting effects. Mr. Craig is a man of genius, but 
he is a very difficult and childish person, whose 
view of the theatre is nearly as damnable as that 
of the most vain of the lost tribe of actor-managers 
or their successors, the shop-keeper syndicates. 
Scenery and lighting effects were of greater con- 
sequence to Mr. Craig than the play itself! His 
[293] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

designs for scenery were very beautiful, indeed, 
but they were suitable only to romantic and 
poetical plays. 

I remember that when he had manipulated Mr. 
Yeats's model theatre to his liking, he stood back 
from the scene, and said, "What a good thing it 
would be if we were to take all the seats out of 
the theatre so that the audience could move about 
and see my shadows!" Mr. Yeats dryly replied 
that this was hardly a practical proposal. I was 
irritated by Mr. Craig's remark which was in keep- 
ing with his general theory of the theatre. It 
seemed to me that he would, were he less difficult 
to work with, be as great a nuisance and danger to 
drama as any actor-manager in London. Sir 
Henry Irving and Sir Herbert Tree, turning the 
attention of the audience away from the play to the 
player and the scenery, were not any worse than 
Mr. Craig, anxious to turn the attention of the audi- 
ence to his shadows. I was glad when this remark- 
able man was carried off by Mr. Albert Rutherston 
and Mr. Ernest Rhys to exhibit himself somewhere 
else. 

Mr. Yeats was bitten with Mr. Craig's theories 
about lighting and scenery, and a large sum of 
[294] 



SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

money for so poor a theatre as the Abbey, was 
spent on some of his "screens" for use in plays 
like "Deirdre." They were never used for any- 
thing else. When I went to Dublin to manage the 
Abbey, I was very anxious that we should employ 
a competent scene-builder to make some good 
"sets" for us, but Mr. Yeats said that scenery was 
of no consequence: the dirty hovel which we always 
employed to represent an Irish cottage or farm 
house would do well enough. I thought there was 
some oddness in this opinion when I remembered 
that the theatre had been almost bankrupted in 
order to purchase "screens" for occasional per- 
formances of his own one-act plays. He would 
spend hours in rehearsing the lighting of a scene 
for one of them: this "lime" was too strong and 
that "lime" was too weak or there was too much 
colour or there was not enough or the mingling 
of colours was not sufficiently delicate. One day, 
when he had worn out the patience of every one 
in the theatre, with his fussing over the lighting, 
he suddenly called out to the stage-manager, 
"That's it! That's it! You've got it right now!" 
"Ah, sure the damned thing's on fire," the stage- 
manager answered. 

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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

VIII 

I have written already that he is not happy with 
an individual: he must have an audience; and I 
remember now something that he said to me which 
supports my belief. We had been talking about 
Synge and his habit of listening at key-holes and 
cracks in the floor in order to hear scraps of con- 
versation that he might put into his plays. I said 
I had been told that Synge, though excessively 
shy and silent in company, was a very companion- 
able person with an individual. He was a good 
comrade on a country road, talking easily and 
naturally, and had the gift of friendliness with 
plain and simple people. Labourers and country- 
men would talk to him as easily as they talked to 
one another, and would confide in him. I won- 
dered whether there were as many entertaining 
tales to be heard from working-people in England 
as were to be heard from working-people in Ire- 
land. Mr. Yeats thought that perhaps there were. 
He told me that the woman who cooked his meals 
and cleaned his rooms had begun to tell some 
story of a love affair to him, but that he had been 
too diffident to encourage her to go on with it, 
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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

He thought that if he had talked to her more than 
he had, she would have told him many stories of 
her youth in the country; but all his talk to her had 
been of food and household things. He is not 
a man in whom poor men and women confide. 
His civility to them is magnificent, but it overawes 
them and makes them as uneasy in one way as 
it pleases them in another. He is an excellent 
entertainer in a crowded room, but he is a poor 
companion on a road. He can talk well to a 
company of educated men and women, but he is 
tongue-tied in the presence of those who have little 
learning. When I survey my acquaintance with 
Yeats, I find strangely diverse thoughts rising in 
my mind. I am drawn to him and repelled by 
him. He stimulates me and depresses me. I am 
moved by the beauty of his work and distracted 
by its vagueness. I find in his writing and in 
his speech, great spiritual loveliness but curiously 
little humanity, and I have often wondered why 
it is that while Irishmen, even such as I am, are 
deeply moved by his little play, "Kathleen ni 
Houlihan," men of other countries — not only 
Englishmen — are left unmoved by it, unable, with- 
out a note in the program, to understand it. I 
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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

have seen this play performed very many times. 
I never missed seeing it, when it was done at the 
Abbey during the time that I was manager there. 
It moved me as much when I last saw it as it did 
when I first saw it; and I do not doubt that if I 
live to be an old man, it will move me as much in 
my old age as it has moved me in my youth. But 
it does not move men of other races. That is a 
singular thing. It denotes, I suppose, that while 
there is much that is national in Mr. Yeats's work, 
there is less that is universal. 

One rises from his work, as one comes from his 
company, with a feeling of chilled respect that 
may settle into disappointment. It is as if one 
had been taken into a richly-decorated drawing- 
room when one had hoped to be taken into a green 
field. I have read Blake's poems and then I have 
read his and sought to see the resemblance that 
I am told is between them, but have not always 
found it. Blake wrote about things that he felt, 
but Mr. Yeats writes about things that he thinks; 
and thought changes and perishes, but feeling is 
permanent and unchangeable; thought separates 
and divides men, but feeling brings them together; 
and it may be that Mr. Yeats's aloofness from 
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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

men is due to the fact that he thinks too much and 
feels too little. »— — — .--..-.^ 



IX 

I think of him as a very lonely, isolated, aloof 
man. He is, so far as I am aware, the only Eng- 
lish-speaking poet who did not write a poem about 
the War, a fact which is at once significant of the 
restraint he imposes upon himself and of his iso- 
lation from the common life of his time. I have 
never met any one who seems so unaware of 
temporary affairs as Mr. Yeats, and this unaware- 
ness is due, not to affectation, but to sheer 
lack of interest. He probably would not have 
known of the War at all had not the Germans 
dropped a bomb near his lodgings off the Euston 
Road. When Macaulay's New Zealander comes 
to examine the ruins of London, he will probably 
see Mr. Yeats, disembodied and unaware that he 
is disembodied or that London is in ruins, sit- 
ting on a slab with a planchette. He is younger 
than Mr. Shaw by ten years, but might be ten 
years older. His verse and his speech and his 
manner are all elderly, and his conversation is 
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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

composed chiefly of reminiscences of men who 
have been dead for many years, so that one imag- 
ines he has not had a friend since 1890. There 
is absolutely no suggestion of youth in his writ- 
ings. In the poem entitled, "To a Child Dancing 
in the Wind," he says: 

I could have warned you, but you are young, 
So we speak a different tongue 

and again: 

But I am old and you are young, 
And I speak a barbarous tongue. 

I do not know what age Mr. Yeats was when 
he wrote those lines, but they are included in 
a collection of poems, dated "1912-1914," and 
at most he could not have been fifty, for he was 
born in Dublin in 1865. 

The sense of age seems to have oppressed his 
mind for many years, perhaps for the whole of 
his creative life. He feels that he has outlived 
his generation and is lost in a period of time 
peculiarly alien to him. 

When I was young, 
I had not given a penny for a song 
Did nfot the poet sing it with such airs 
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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

That one believed he had a sword upstafrs: 
Yet would be now, could I but have my wish, 
Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish. 

This coldness closing on his heart and congealing 
all his generous emotions, causes him, at the end 
of a graceful book, "Reveries Over Childhood and 
Youth" (in itself, significant of the age-obsession 
which possesses his mind) to declare that "all life, 
weighed in the scales of my own life, seems to me 
a preparation for something that never happens," 
and leaves his readers wondering why a man 
who began his life by singing songs with such 
airs "that one believed he had a sword upstairs" 
should stumble into dismal prose towards the end 
of it, pronouncing life to be a cheerless deceit. 

His effect on young men is peculiar. His bril- 
liant conversation is very attractive to them, but 
his insensibility to the presence of human beings 
repels them. "A. E." once told me that Mr. Ar- 
thur Griffith, the founder of the Sinn Fein move- 
ment, drew young people to him by the strength 
of his hatred, but finally repelled them by his 
complete lack of charity and love. A nature 
compounded principally or exclusively of hatred 
must be destructive. No man can construct any- 
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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

thing unless love and charity predominate in his 
heart. Mr. Griffith, throughout his career, has 
never been notable for his power to make things. 
He could not even make his own movement grow, 
for Sinn Fein became a popular and appealing 
force only after Padraic Pearce and Thomas Mac- 
donagh and James Connolly had put a fire into 
the machinery of it on Easter Monday, 1916. 
There is something terribly ironical in the fact 
that James Connolly, to whom Mr. Griffith of- 
fered every possible opposition in his lifetime, 
should by his death have helped to put Mr. Grif- 
fith in a position of authority to which his own in- 
tellectual and spiritual qualities could never have 
raised him. Mr. Yeats has something of the un- 
humanity of Mr. Griffith. His talk is brilliant, in- 
deed, but it is not comradely talk. It never lapses 
from high quality to the easy familiarities which 
humanize all relationships. He is more fastidious 
about his speech than he is about his friends. It 
would shock him more to use a bad word than to 
make a bad friend, because he is more aware of 
bad words than of bad men; and he would be 
quicker to forgive a crime than to forgive a vulgar 
phrase. I have never heard him use a common ex- 
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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

pression. He once repeated an angry speech of 
William Morris to me with an air almost apologetic 
for using profane language, not because it was pro- 
fane but because it was inelegant. He never says 
"Damn!" or "Blast!" when he is angry. ... He 
is one of the loneliest men in the world, for he 
cannot express himself except in a crowd. Dr. 
Stockman said that the strongest man in the world 
is the man who stands absolutely alone — a feat 
which is surely impossible — and this specious state- 
ment has supported many ineffective egoists in 
their belief that neurosis is strength and misbehav- 
iour a sign of individuality. But the penalty of 
isolation is that the isolated cannot dispense with 
an amenable crowd. The hermit must have a suc- 
cession of respectful pilgrims to his cave, each one 
murmuring, "There is but one God and Thou art 
His Prophet!" until at last the hermit begins to be- 
lieve that he is God and God is his prophet. Her- 
mits have followers, or, perhaps one ought to say, 
curious visitors, but they have no friends. Why 
should they have friends? They have not got the 
social sense nor can they take part in the common 
labours of mankind. They live in caves and de- 
sert places because they are not fit to live in houses 
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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

and places that are inhabited. But even the her- 
mits, wrapped in self-sufficiency, realize that no 
man is effective without his fellows, and so, though 
they cannot make friends, they make disciples. 
This is a truth which all the great lonely men from 
Adam to Robinson Crusoe have discovered, that a 
man by himself is ineffective and without interest. 
Life for Adam remained uneventful until the ar- 
rival of Eve: the island of Juan Fernandez was 
livelier after Man Friday came to keep Crusoe 
company. For fellowship is life, as Morris said, 
and lack of fellowship is death. 

/"There is no poet, not even Keats or Shelley, who 

i has so much of pure poetry in his work as Mr. 

' Yeats has in his, and perhaps that is enough; but 
there is no other poet, not even Mr. Kipling, who 

[has so little understanding of human kind. It is 
an odd commentary on his relationship to his 
countrymen that while he was writing the bitter 
poem, entitled "September, 1913," with the deso- 
lating refrain: 

Romantic Ireland's dead and gone — 
It's with O'Leary in the grave. 

Thomas Macdonagh and Padraic Pearse and James 
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SOME IMPRESSIONS OF MY ELDERS 

Connolly were preparing themselves for a romantic 
death. 

John Davidson, in a book called "Sentences and 
Paragraphs," writes of Keats that, "beginning and 
ending his intemperate period with the too ample 
verge and room, the trailing fringe and sample-like 
embroidery of 'Endymion,' he was soon writing 
the most perfect odes in the language." Mr. Yeats, 
in spite of some reluctant instructions into enthu- 
siastic movements, escaped "the intemperate 
period"; but he did so at the cost of his youth and 
ardour. Like the Magi in his poem of that name, 
he, "being by Calvary's turbulence imsatisfied," 
seeks "to find once more" "the uncontrollable mys- 
tery on the bestial floor"; but it eludes him, and 
will always elude him, because he thinks of its hab- 
itation as "a bestial floor." It can only be found 
by a poet who, whatever happens, still believes that 
the earth is a place where God may yet walk in 
safety. Mr. Yeats is the greatest poet that Ireland 
has produced, but he has meant very little to the 
people of Ireland, for he has forgotten the ancient 
purpose of the bards, to urge men to a higher des- 
tiny by reminding them of their high origin, and 
has lived, aloof and disdainful, as far from human 
kind as he can conveniently get. '^ 

[305] 



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